It would be handy for group owners to be notified when they are given group owner privileges, maybe with the group glyph. Something along the lines of “You are now group owner of x group”.
Likewise when their privs are revoked, they’d be notified “You are no longer group owner of x group”.
On the group members page, they’d see a message at the top along the lines of “You are group owner, and can add/remove members.”
That is a very good idea @sam and could be done via PM or even, wait for it, group PM
Is this still relevant? if so it should be on @tgxworld’s longer term list.
Groups are used for various purposes. I think changing owners is very much an admin/non-routine function, so the PM could be manual with special instructions when the admin makes the change, if needed.
I guess I don’t object to single add/remove PM to the owner, but groups can be very large so a group PM would not be ideal. Users might be confused by a group PM.
Changes are logged now and visible in the Group page for admin/owners. Less need for an audit trail via PMs.
If I was going to prioritize group features (feel free to split this topic) it would prefer bumping up in this order:
auto-joining new/non-logged in users to requested groups after user registration/login This really helps with onboarding users in a frictionless way.
add option to group page settings to NOT display groups at /group even if otherwise public. This helps clean up the /groups page and want to selectively show a few primary groups.
removing the “everyone must be able to message this group” requirement + TL0 PM support This also helps new users who want to join.
Just notes from the front line. Thanks very much. All the group features are great.
@tobiaseigen Any thoughts about this? I do see a use case for an automated “welcome to this group” message when adding a group user but like @scombs mentioned, adding/removing group owners is abit of an edge case that can be handled manually via a PM.
Be careful with this however because groups are used for a lot of different purposes including just for permissions. Also people get moved around to different groups by admins as sites are built out or change. Generating “welcome” emails could create a lot of noise and unintended consequences. For other systems, I have seen checkboxes to “notify users” on the screen where the change is made, but this seems like overkill here.
An exception would be a notice to a user if the notice was based on a request of the user to be added to the group. This could part of the “request” workflow. The user would be expecting that message.
Same issues as above. Also owners are set up in some cases just for the admin purposes or to know who should be listed in the group as the owners apart from the others. The owner may not actually do much with the group admin functions so sending them email might require more work for admins to explain things.
I like the idea of adding text to the group page for owners. Generating notifications is more problematic.
I feel like putting this on the backburner, it is very rarely requested.
To recap you are asking that
But, how far do we go. What about notifying on new members, should a group owner be allowed to opt in for new membership in the group? Do we collapse multiple notifications here, so if you add 20 members owners only get 1 notification.
I just don’t feel strongly enough about this feature, it deals with one edge case and really, whoever adds a new owner can just PM the old owners if they wish.
We have a related issue:
It is important to notify users that someone added them to group “X” (or removed them, e.g. like facebook does). Otherwise there will be much repeated confusion or manual work for group owner to notify them as PM.
Also it is important to notify the group owners about new/left users (to take timely actions).
Use case:
On our forum we need to restrict topic creating powers in category “Y” to members of group “X”. Our supporters automatically get added to Patrons group (via Patreon plugin), then we create a dedicated category for their needs (as a reward).
We also create a dedicated group for each of our Patron (so they can invite their staff to post in their dedicated category).
It would be even better if members of a particular group (e.g. Patrons) could create one group themselves, and automatically become the owner of that group. 
When someone leaves a group (e.g. stops their support and leaves the Patrons group) the owner of that group (e.g. site admin) would receive a notification and then manually perform some actions (e.g. change permissions per category “Y” or assign a new owner for group “X”).
Update: @sam Sorry for buzzing, but could you take a second look at this request?
So can we have group option to send new members that join a group welcome message and a bye bye message when they leave the group? Hope those can be added as group options @sam
This will be really useful for groups that are bound to some privileges/products/subscriptions they gain or loose.
Funny I recently talked about workflows and now all these workflow questions are popping up:
You are going to need a plugin for now to achieve this level of magic.