Hi, currently in the group settings, these are the options:
I would like to recommend that another option be added: “Only Group Owners”.
There are many potential use cases for this.
In our community, we have some staff-led groups for VIPs. We do not want our VIPs to message or mention the entire group. But we do want our staff to be able to do so. Our staff want the confidence that Discourse can perform as well as email in terms of ensuring that a message goes out to all the VIPs. At the same time, we don’t know that our VIPs will have the self-restraint to not use this feature.
The other benefit? If only group owners can mention or message a group, then this creates more accountability and control over the function. In that case, it would be acceptable to remove the restriction on how many people can be @mentioned or messaged by a group owner. The default should be that they can @mention or message everyone in their group. This allows a Discourse site owner to spread ownership of the community out to many other group leaders. These group owners don’t need to be moderators or site admins, they just need the ability to run their specific group well.
Correct. Moderators have access to nearly all the admin settings. We are a large global organization with a wide variety of skill sets, etc. I want to give our staff ownership of the groups relevant to their area of responsibility without empowering them across our entire site. I think they also want that focus.
Aha. It wasn’t the argument that owners should be able to mention/message groups that I didn’t understand but that the moderator powers are too much for your group owners.
To be more precise, most of my group owners don’t need or want these powers:
Power user capable of moderating the site:
Can process flags
Can delete topics and posts, split topics, merge topics, hide topics and so on.
Can view user info including email address
For our staff who just want to run a group of their VIP users, seeing flags across the site would be an unwelcome distraction. Giving them access to any user’s email address might not be appropriate. For some of the junior staff who are group owners because we want them to have responsibilities for processing group membership requests (an administrative function), I might not want them to be able to delete topics and posts on the site.
I have a similar use case here: I run a games directory where different game owners (and their staff) can manage a group for their respective communities which include members on my site who also play their game. These are staff for other communities, but not staff for my own.
It would be useful to empower these owners with the ability to message all of their players and fans within my community, but we don’t want every single group member to also have this power.
