# What exactly does "Automatically set as primary group" do?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-exactly-does-automatically-set-as-primary-group-do/62222>\
**Category:** Support\
**Created:** [May 6, 2017, 3:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-exactly-does-automatically-set-as-primary-group-do/62222 "2017-05-06T15:55:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![tophee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tophee/32/73406_2.png) [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)\
**Post date:** [May 6, 2017, 3:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-exactly-does-automatically-set-as-primary-group-do/62222/1 "2017-05-06T15:55:19Z")

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I understand that when I check the “Automatically set as primary group” option in a group’s settings, the idea is that when a user joins this group, this group will become the user’s primary group, right?

 ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/a/d/ad6a7f7871c2ad865f0b2800394ab5a0a846f3c9.png)

Furthermore, the effects of setting a primary group in general have been [well explained](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-does-selecting-primary-group-for-a-user-do/25857).

But here are some questions:

1. Does this work retrospectively, i.e. if I check this option for a group that already has members, will this set the group as their primary group?
2. Am I right in assuming that it is always the last group that the user joins (and which has this setting activated) that becomes the primary group?
3. Where it gets more complicated is when you also automatically set a title based on the primary group. You’d think that the title changes when the primary group changes but this [does not seem to be the case](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-automatically-set-the-user-title-for-certain-groups/26535). And some (not me) might argue the user title should only change if the new primary group actually has a user title assigned to it. So the question is twofold: what _is_ the current behaviour and what _should_ be the behaviour?

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