Firstly I think the Groups feature is excellent, and shaping up fast, thanks to the efforts of @tgxworld and others.
One suggestion - I think the “Topics” and “Activity” tabs need re-thinking on the group page.
These tabs show all topics and all activity by group members. This doesn’t make sense in the use case where groups are used to control access to special categories.
The content of these special categories constitutes the “activity” of the group (and in my case I’d want this activity to be hidden from forum users unless they are a member of the group).
I said something similar last week, Chris. I can understand how rejiggering the Topics and Activity tabs in the group detail page aren’t at the top of the development list. But your comment and mine highlight the persistence of the issue with having information that isn’t just counter-intuitive, but confusing as well.
I can’t speak as to whether this was valid in the past, but it’s no longer the case that activity in /groups/TEAMNAME/activity for restricted categories appears to users who don’t have access.
You will only see activity in common or shared areas. So if two teams share one category and have additional categories locked down to their respective groups you will only see activity from the other team pertaining to the shared category.
If none of those areas are public then anonymous users and members outside those groups will see nothing.
We are moving into using groups more actively on our forum, not only to control access to categories, but also to allow for cohorts of members to message each other regarding shared projects, without setting up a separate category.
I do find the Activity tab confusing (or at least, misleading), since I would expect to see activity related to the group on that tab. Instead it shows activity from the members of that group across the entire forum.
For example, we have a group that runs a weekly video podcast, which has its own pubilc channel. Members of the group can post to the channel, but they can also message the group privately to discuss issues or plan upcoming events.
The group is listed on our groups page. That way all members can see who is in the group, and even apply to join if they would like to be part of the organizing team. However, if as a non-group member, I go to the group page to learn more about it, and I click the activty tab—I will see a whole bunch of posts that have nothing to do with the group.
It seems to me that the Activtity tab on a group’s page should show activity related to that group.
What kind of activity would be appropriate to show? Perhaps limit this to posts from only categories where the group (not just the individual members) has write permissions? Perhaps an activity feed related to those channels—such as “user x hearted user y’s post…user z just replied to group message q…”?
I’m sure there are other possibilities that would also be more relevant to the group’s activity than what currently displays.