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.
AI-generated summary
tobiaseigen proposes making group permissions transparent on category and topic pages to clarify which groups have specific permissions. codinghorror requests a visual mockup, which tobiaseigen provides, suggesting the groups icon could be used to communicate security settings.
codinghorror expresses skepticism about the feature’s value, but tobiaseigen argues that it would be helpful for users to understand why they have certain permissions or restrictions. The discussion is revisited when tobiaseigen sets up a private category and realizes that users want to know who else is in the category and what permissions they have.
sperok shares a similar use case, where a MOOC with thousands of students and 120 teaching assistants would benefit from a quick way to provide a roster of the teaching assistant group. markvanlan merges a commit adding a permissions tab to the group view, which lists categories that explicitly give the group access.
Tris20 asks if there are plans to make this editable in the Permissions view, and markvanlan responds that while it might be nice to add category permissions from the group view, there are no plans to make this happen at the moment.
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.
1개의 좋아요
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.
1개의 좋아요
@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.
2개의 좋아요
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. 
1개의 좋아요
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.
6개의 좋아요
이 주제에 대한 자연스러운 후속 질문은, 권한(Permissions) 보기에서 이를 편집할 수 있도록 할 계획이 있는지입니다. 그렇지 않다면, 수십 개의 그룹에 대해 수십 개의 범주(Categories)를 다뤄야 하는 경우, 저는 다음 작업을 수행해야 합니다:
이 방식에는 제가 수정해야 하는 범주에 대해 모든 그룹을 검토하도록 유도되어, 업데이트가 필요한 다른 그룹을 우연히 발견할 수도 있다는 장점이 있습니다. 그러나 범주(Categories)의 보안(Security) 탭과 같은 체크박스를 사용하여 그룹의 권한을 변경할 수 있다면 훨씬 더 유용할 것입니다.
제 경우, 수백 개의 범주(Categories)가 있으며, 범주당 최대 6개에서 12개까지의 그룹이 있을 수 있습니다. 따라서, 모든 그룹과 범주(Categories) 권한을 비교할 수 있는 수정 가능한 테이블이 제공된다면 더 좋을 것입니다.
스태프라면 여기서 카테고리 권한을 추가할 수 있으면 좋겠지만, 카테고리 그룹 권한을 관리하기 위한 여러 UI를 원하는지 확신은 없습니다. 현재로서는 이를 구현할 계획이 전혀 없습니다. @Designers가 이 아이디어를 좋아한다면, 해당 기능을 추가하는 방안을 고려해 볼 수 있을 것 같습니다.
2개의 좋아요