In a discussion about the staff group in Discourse, ganncamp noticed that not all staff members are included in the staff group and attempted to automate membership using company email domains — but found no “Membership” tab for this group. JammyDodger clarified that @staff is an automatic group combining @admins and @moderators, and cannot be manually edited like regular groups — confirming that Dax’s post is essentially the full explanation. pfaffman suggested creating a custom group like Sonarsources_staff for internal use, but ganncamp noted that such a group cannot be excluded from member statistics, which is the original goal. The thread highlights a gap between organizational staff (company employees) and Discourse’s technical definition of “staff” (admins/moderators), and the lack of flexibility in excluding custom groups from automated reports.
I’d like to better understand this special group, but my searches here aren’t turning up much that’s helpful. Or is this really all there is to know about it?
The @staff group is one of the automatic ones so people can’t be added to it manually like the other groups. It’s essentially the @admins and @moderators in one combined place (‘site staff’ rather than company employees).
So Dax’s post you linked is pretty much the long and short of it:
