# Good use cases for groups (to better understand groups vs categories)

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/good-use-cases-for-groups-to-better-understand-groups-vs-categories/62875>\
**Category:** Community Building\
**Created:** [2017 年5 月 17 日 13:39 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/good-use-cases-for-groups-to-better-understand-groups-vs-categories/62875 "2017-05-17T13:39:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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作者： ![tophee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tophee/32/73406_2.png) [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)\
发布日期： [2017 年5 月 17 日 13:39 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/good-use-cases-for-groups-to-better-understand-groups-vs-categories/62875/1 "2017-05-17T13:39:16Z")

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I’m trying to get my head around possible uses of groups. Or rather: good uses, because the number of possible uses is virtually infinite. My basic question here is: how do you use groups?

My guess is that the most common use of groups is to use them a way of managing access to categories (and/or badges) and not much more. But with [group mentions and messages](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-mentions-and-messages/36228) there seems to be much potential for using them to communicate too. I imagine them group messaging like a little mailing list, though not necessarily with emails since those will only be sent to users who are watching the group, right? In contrast to categories, the group can be setup so that people can easily enter and leave groups.

When it comes to communicating through groups, a crucial seems to be `Default notification level for group messages` which is set to `normal` by default, which means that group members will no notice even the wildest discussions going on in their group unless they are mentioned, right? In other words, to make use of groups for messaging you probably want to change that setting to `tracking` or higher and you want to do it from the outset because it is not applied retrospectively to existing members.

But the point of this topic is: what does this look like in practice? And in cases where similar results can be achieved with both groups and categories, how did you decide which one to use?

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/good-use-cases-for-groups-to-better-understand-groups-vs-categories/62875)._