my Discourse version: 2026.5.0-latest (601e66da60)
I was testing some group visibility behaviour on the /about page and wanted to check whether the current behaviour is intentional, or whether I may be misunderstanding the purpose of about page hidden groups.
Scenario
I had:
about page hidden groups = admins, friends, Mods
about page extra groups = Mods
A user was:
a member of the hidden friends group
and also a member of the visible Mods group
I initially expected membership in a hidden group to suppress the user from appearing anywhere on /about.
However, the user still appeared via the visible Mods group section.
After more testing (including impersonating a non-admin user), I discovered the behaviour instead seems to be:
about page hidden groups hides the group section itself
but does not suppress individual users from appearing through another visible group
The thing that ultimately prevented the user appearing publicly was changing:
Who can see this group’s members?
from:
Everyone
to:
Group owners, members and moderators
on the visible group.
Question
Is this the intended behaviour?
If so, it may be worth clarifying in the setting description or documentation, because the name about page hidden groups could reasonably be interpreted as:
“hide members of these groups from the About page”
rather than:
“hide these group sections from the About page”
The interaction between:
about page hidden groups
about page extra groups
and group member visibility permissions
is subtle enough that I suspect other admins may make the same assumption I initially did.
Why bother putting the same group to be hidden AND to be shown on purpose? IIRC the former setting hides the ‘Our Admins’ / ‘Our Moderators’ section, while the latter adds more groups below. From my testing, it does not look at the first setting to control the visibility. So if you add Moderators to both, a new section titled ‘moderators’ will be shown with members, while the ‘Our Moderators’ section will be removed.
that was a demonstration, the same behaviour was observed on the non-admin account, regardless of whether Mods is also in about page hidden groups
yes, site-wide administrators disappear and the moderators has one numeric member not listed, when looking on the admin account, despite Who can see this group? and Who can see this group’s members? both being set to Group owners, moderators, and members
the full name for the Mods group is Our Moderators.
I’m proposing change here, where any user in a group in about page hidden groups cannot be shown as a member of a group on the /about page as being in any of the about page extra groups
I think this behaviour may be better controlled by a boolean site setting, perhaps something like:
about_page_exclude_hidden_group_members
The wording intentionally avoids implying any broader anonymity/privacy guarantee, since this would only affect how users are rendered in /about group listings, not whether administrators may reference those users elsewhere via customized text/content.
In my testing, a combination of these Group Interaction settings can take precedence on the /about page, because it can hide groups on the /about page for an admin user as-well.