I think it would be helpful to make permissions transparently known on the forum, so that when you are looking at the category and topic pages you can see precisely which groups have permission to do what in those categories and topics. This might also provide UI to get to the group membership lists as well which currently are not visible anywhere obvious except on profile pages.
Can you provide a visual mockup of what you are describing please.
It seems to me that the groups icon is the way to communicate security settings - the one that is included on the category buttons in various places for when categories have non-default security. This would be hidden everywhere on public groups as it is already. When there are non-default security settings it would show up and be clickable to show a popup with info about groups and security settings. This would be identical to what you see on the security settings page, except that on the popup the group name would be clickable to take you to the group members list.
Here’s a very quick and dirty mockup of category page:
I don’t know where the group icon would live on category or topics pages - there is so much going on in those pages that is beyond me. 
maybe the best place would be below the WATCHING button with “SECURITY” or “GROUPS” heading, with similar functioning as WATCHING. Or it could go at the top next to the star, or next to the topic date, or within the topic summary box. f it goes into the topic summary box the full contents of the popup could also be displayed when that summary box is opened up to show the details.
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Seems of limited value to me, most of the private groups/categories users can’t see at all.
So if you are in a group, or have access to a category with the group glyph indicating the category is only visible to certain groups, presumably you’d know why as a member of said group/category.
I guess we could show the permissions in the category page somewhere, but doesn’t feel necessary to me.
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@codinghorror that seems generally true, but does not account for all of the permissions that can be set for a category. People will be scratching their heads at why they can see a topic but not reply, reply to topics but not start topics, etc. Not everyone is going to want to have totally public forums and for those with members-only categories or other site-specific rules will benefit from being able to more easily see what’s going on.
All that said, I can understand that this is not a priority for you now. Maybe it’ll come up later.
I’ve now set up a private category for another set of stakeholders on my forum, and am trying to wrap my head around this issue again. People in the private category want to know who else is in the category, and who they are talking to and sharing information with.
Right now, it’s possible to get at this information but only indirectly. It seems to be you have to go to the user profile page of a group member, click on the group name under the person’s name, then click on the members submenu.
Now that we have this lovely functionality to diplay a group logo and description, would it be feasible to display the group permissions below the description? Something along these lines? You’d click on e.g BLOGGERS group to go to the member list of the group.
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Have there been any further thoughts on this? I am being asked to provide similar functionality on our forum as well. In our case we have a MOOC being taught to thousands of students, with about 120 teaching assistants. The teaching assistants are all part of one group (Red-Belt using the martial arts metaphor) and we are looking for a quick way to provide a roster of that group. The approach suggested here would be close, even better for us would be to pull profile info:
full name : username : about me : website : posts : likes: views : activity
No, I haven’t thought about this since June and didn’t even notice back then that @codinghorror liked the idea.
I still think it would be good to have but don’t know how important it is as a feature for the core team. It may have to be be contributed. 
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Is it very hard? I thought the info is in the files, it is a reverse search function, isn’t it?
I’m not sure what you mean by “in the files”. I would say the information is “in the database”. And I’m also not sure what you mean by “reverse search”. I would say “JOINed” i.e.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/models/category_group.rb
I just merged in a commit that adds a permissions tab to the group view. This lists all categories that explicitly give the group access.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/b7a092bd28a18288171ab5d9f2664d11e5e62f8e
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The natural followup question for this is, are there plans to make this editable in the Permissions view? Otherwise for potentially dozens of categories for dozens of groups, I will need to do the following:
This does have the advantage that I will be pushed to review all Groups for the Category I needed to modify, and potentially catch other Groups that need an update. However, being able to change the permissions of a group with checkboxes such as the Security tab in the Category would also be very beneficial.
In my case it’s possible we have hundreds of Categories, and as many as six to a dozen Groups per category. So, a modifyable table of all Groups vs Category Permissions would perhaps be even better.
It might be nice to be able to add category permissions from here if you were staff, but I’m not sure we want multiple UIs to manage category group permissions. There are certainly no plans to make this happen at the moment. If @Designers likes the idea I could see us adding the feature.
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