without assigning them an admin or mod role?
Tried digging through settings and didn’t see an option.
It’s not possible. Groups are used mostly to control access to categories. What is your use case?
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groups can determine user flairs as you know
Users want to determine flairs, maybe there’s another way to let them do this
also people are just used to vbulletin like sites where being part of a group is just a fun way to be a ‘member’ of something, even if they don’t post in it
But I think the flair thing is the main reason
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You want folks to create their own flair? Very brave. 
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If it’s just for one user, couldn’t they just put the flair on their avatar? Do you want to risk that someone would make a group that had the same flair as staff?
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I am running into this issue with my community. I would like local groups of ham radio operators to be able to create clubs/groups themselves.
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That would be awesome. Coupled with the ability for group owners to create categories would make it very redditish.
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This isn’t on our roadmap at the moment sorry. It’s counterintuitive to the way Discourse works.
What do people want to use groups for? Could they not just use group PMs?
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There see so many of them that creating these by hand is too much work?
Would you let them create an infinite number of them?
Since it’s not on the roadmap you’d need a plugin. If you have a budget you can post in marketplace. You’ll need a few more details though. Would you just want anyone of a certain trust level to have access to the create groups and categories interface?
The groups will be used to set up ham radio contacts and discuss frequencies they will use as well as local events. I plan to automatically add users to appropriate location groups based on location metadata about the user. Currently my users subscribe through my main wordpress website. It also seems that Groups don’t exist as an object that is viewable within discourse. You can’t have a Group page, users can’t request to join groups, as far as I’m aware. This functionality is extremely important in my case, because my platform will have multiple smaller local groups of ham radio operators.
It seems discourse is set up for one centralized forum, but doesn’t support this use case unfortunately
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You can add /g to the URL, eg Discourse Meta.
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@Jonathan5 awesome! I didn’t realize that there was a groups page that users could view. This is very helpful.
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Would it be practicable for you to create a group of one (the member who wants to create a group), and an associated private category, and make the member moderator of that category?
My first priority is creating statewide groups, and then later they will become more localized where I will want to appoint leaders for each group.
I think the best option may be to create a category and group for each us state, then use the API to automatically add users to the group based on their state. As the users become part of local clubs later, I could follow that approach where I allow users to request to be a club leader by some process. But I would then need a geolocation based service to help recommend the correct clubs to the each user, so that would require creating a location service in wordpress that and maintaining a record of clubs and their address. Its feasible I suppose and I could eventually have a private category for each club linked to the private group for each club.
I also have the same question.
Is there any way to allow all users to create their own private categories (each one being tied to individual groups)?
I’ve slid your question over to this recent topic as I think it has more in common than where you originally asked it.
I’m afraid creating personal groups/categories categories/groups is not something that is currently a feature of Discourse:
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Though if a member asks and suggests group/category names, couldn’t you create a group with just that member plus an associated private category? He could then invite others.
Is it possible through a plugin?
That would eventually become impossible on a much larger scale.
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I have it on good authority that it might be: 
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