# Guide to Groups **URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/guide-to-groups/110064 **Category:** Support **Created:** [February 25, 2019, 7:27pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/guide-to-groups/110064 "2019-02-25T19:27:51Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 7
### Author: ![ChrisBeach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/chrisbeach/32/214628_2.png) [@ChrisBeach](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ChrisBeach) #### Post date: [February 25, 2019, 8:15pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/guide-to-groups/110064/7 "2019-02-25T20:15:21Z")
> [@CapedCrusader](#): > > I misunderstood “Groups” as some sort of private category with select membership and visibility. I’ve set up a few groups on my forums with accompanying private categories. I refer to these as “opt in categories” Having the ability to define arbitrary groups of users is a useful feature of Discourse. The join/request features added by @tgxworld work brilliantly. To some extent my “opt in categories” operate like Facebook Groups (which is a good thing) with some notable drawbacks: - forum members are unable to start new groups of their own - opting in to a “group” to see an opt-in category is confusing UX (I’d prefer users could opt-in directly to categories via some redesigned UI). - if a user tries to follow a link to an opt-in category / topic that they’re not opted in to see, they get an unhelpful error, and no means of opting in. - the “group page” / “group activity” model has no UX linkage to the accompanying category, and is therefore counter-intuitive These drawbacks concern me, because Facebook Groups are drawing users away from my forum. Only today, a user [created a Facebook Group rather than continuing discussion on the Discourse instance](https://se26.life/t/se26-enterprise-club-meetup-at-ignition-brewery/1053/17?u=chrisbeach). And the same thing happened a few days ago in another discussion on one of my forums. There are many ways in which Discourse is better than Facebook. However, our support for user-run Groups lags at the moment and IMO would be a priority to improve. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/guide-to-groups/110064)._