Just like it makes sense to distinguish between different types of badges, there should also be different types of groups (in badges, it’s called “groups” so I guess I’m talking about “group groups”). Is this something that’s already on someone’s to-do list?
To be more specific: groups can be based on all kinds of criteria, e.g. geographic location, occupation, special interest etc so it would make sense to list them on the /groups page according to those criteria, right? I would even wish to have separate groups pages for each group group à la /groups/country. (BTW: that would be a nice feature for the badges too: /badges/community, /badges/posting, etc)
I think I understand what you’re getting at.
Currently Badges are grouped into Bronze, Silver, Gold and Custom.
Though this choice of grouping could be debated IMHO it works and is a concept that is easily understood,
But I don’ think anything similar would work for Groups, that is, it would be difficult to come up with a one size fits all scheme. At least nothing that I can think of at the moment.
Maybe a parent child approach similar to categories would be better than grouping groups?
Maybe a way to order them would be good enough?
As for separate pages, those already exist unless I’m not understanding what you’re saying
This is a good idea - on our site we have so many groups, and we use them for a variety of purposes. displaying them like badges is helpful. Right now we are able to (mostly) achieve that on our site by using a particular naming convention for groups… but it would be nice to be more intentional about the ordering like we are with badges.
You mean because that allows you to create some ugly group names for sorting the list?
Problem is that if you hide the group names it might be confusing for people to understand the sorting logic. Also, if you allow groups to be mentioned, it might be good to show the group name (perhaps with an @ before it?
Anyway, I’d say there is some potential for a better structure of the groups page…
Something like this would be my preference, similar to what is on the site settings or users or logs page, where I can type to filter what groups are shown.
Whatever I type could be matched against @groupname, Full Group Name and Group Description.
A search box is surely nice, but it solves a different problem: it makes it easy to find a group if you know what you are looking for.
The idea with groups of groups was to make the groups page more accessible by dividing it into sections, just like on the Badges page. @tobiaseigen provides a nice example above:
Bumping this old topic because we would find it really useful. We are going down the naming convention route but it is cumbersome and doesn’t really meet the need to be able to see all groups of a certain type - regional groups, local groups, working groups and so on.
Ideal would be to have the site admin able to create new group types and assign groups to a type and then have the types appear in the Filter by Group Type dropdown list.
Dividing the main groups page into type would also be good
Is anyone working on this?
I think there is merit to having the same organizational unit badges have in the group context (eg each group can optionally belong to a group category). In fact I would expect larger numbers of groups to exist than badges.
As to when we can slot this, up to @codinghorror. The idea definitely has merit. The big open question is if we would use a “tag” like concept so groups can belong to multiple “grouping” or category like concept where groups only belong to one thing
Tagging would allow more creativity and possibilities for forum owners, I guess. I can definitely vote for tags on groups. If we also can add group tags on category permissions I think this would greatly benefit large communities.
Yes, and since you can use (though not enforce) tags as “categories” there aren’t really any downsides with a tagging system. Any cast differences in implementation?
There’s the rub, categories are useful if you want to enforce a hierarchy, tags are better if you want a many-many relationship. If it is a choice of one or other I’d vote tags, but both would be really cool.
Hierarchy? What would be a use case where you need a hierarchy of groups of groups?
In any case, there is nothing more hierarchical in categories than in tags. Also, it depends on what you mean by hierarchy. Take the trust level hierarchy, for instance: members of higher trust level groups are also members of lower trust level groups, so this hierarchy wouldn’t be achievable with categories.
So I guess the emphasis with categories is really on the enforce part. Enforce membership in a single category, regardless of whether the categories are ordered hierarchically or not.
Yes I think that is it. You can see “category” (in the common sense rather than the Discourse specific use as a replacement for “forum”) as a special case of a tag where an item can only belong to one category.
You can be either mammal or reptile - category - but you can have four legs and blue eyes in both cases - tags.
Tags might be harder to implement (many-many relationships, potentially with restrictions, eg you can be four legged and blue eyed but you cant be blue eyed and green eyed), so categories might be a useful quicker first step. Or might be a distraction from perfection!
This is a feature we’ve been thinking about for our forum too.
On our forum, we have a somewhat large number of groups, and we can distinguish a few different types of groups that we maintain:
Skill groups: These are game development professions like “Programmer”, “3D Modeler”, etc. Users can join these freely to display the corresponding title on their forum user.
Community groups: Specific committees/initiatives by community members that they have requested a group for so they can maintain a message inbox.
Language groups: We have a highly multi-national community, so we have some groups (i.e. “French Developers”, “German Developers”, etc) so that people can show off their nationality and chat with each other on normally-hidden subcategories.
Staff groups: several groups that contain teams in our company with title/flair so that users can easily recognize and get in contact with us.
I think it would be really neat if we could organize these groups in four categories on our forum instance.
Has any work been put into this feature yet / into finalizing a spec for this feature? We originally wanted to develop this as a plugin for our forum specifically, but I would be happy to collaborate on this.
