To integrate group memberships more fluidly into the community-building aspects of Discourse posts, it would helpful to have a short-cut for inserting the join group interface directly into any post.
For example, it could be a code added to the end of a group name, e.g. @volunteers_group:join. Whether the button appears as +Join or +Request to join or -Leave will depend on the users current membership and group security.
The button should be displayed with the group name, as well as a note indicating what priviliges joining that group offers, i.e. is it a public/private group; which categories have added visibility.
The feature would give administrators of projects the ability to bootstrap teams very efficiently.
I think the use case is around self service, the groups page is kind of hidden, it would be a fairly complex change permission wise to support the proposal though
There are three content streams being featured, but each attendee should pick only one to focus on. Select which group to join below. We are also looking for 5 jury members to choose winning projects. Apply if interested.
So you’re saying that there is already a method in the codebase for generating this link, contrary to @sam’s concern, and it’s mostly a matter of building a new UI around generating the link?
I think that “Stream 1…” example would still work pretty well if those “JOIN” buttons were appropriately styled and just linked to the group page. I strongly doubt you’d lose many people in the onboard funnel with that extra click.
Although far from a perfect equivalent, I do hate it when websites use that interactive “follow us” Twitter widget which asks me to follow them immediately instead of taking me to their Twitter stream so I can see if I’m actually interested in what they’re putting out.
Sort of, we should allow for /groups?only-show-group=bla which would be a very easy change and take away a ton of the current noise of simply linking to the groups page. (eg: what if there are 100 groups)
Raising this from the dead, I’ve searched and not found a good option - We want to make a lot of site settings centralized to one place.
a ‘notify me if the chatbot mentions @xyz group’ yes-no selection that links to the group join/leave handler. Linking to groups/?showonly= is the next best thing but ‘joining’ a ‘settings group’ isn’t intuitive for a lot of our users.
I like the ideas discussed in this topic. Groups could certainly use some love, though it’s not an area of focus for the team right now. Feel free to implement improvements as a theme component to try it out!
One thought that came to me is that we could add Join/Leave buttons on the user card for groups that allow people to join and leave freely.