I should start by saying we are actively discussing ways to improve the primary group concept, so there may be changes in the not too distant future.
While I wasn’t a part of creating the title and group flair features, I can give an example of why having the two features independent of each other can be helpful, as well as clarify how they currently work.
Let’s say a site has a “Team” group that consists of everyone in the company. It’s helpful to know a user is a part of the team at a glance, so they set up group avatar flair for the “Team” group and make sure all members have the “Team” group set as their primary group to ensure the flair displays.
Team members are broken into different roles - let’s say support and engineering - and are members of corresponding groups. In addition to knowing that a user is part of the overall team, it would also helpful to know what role they have. Given that the site wants everyone on the team to share the same “Team” avatar flair, they can specify a default title in their “Support” and “Engineering” user groups. The end result would look something like this:
I’m not sure if that the best example, but it’s one workflow a site could use.
There are definitely some nuances to both the “Automatically set as primary group” and “Default title” group preferences.
Primary Group
- If when creating a new group, the “Automatically set as primary group” option is checked, all members will have their primary group set/overwritten upon the new group’s creation
- If you go into an existing group’s settings and check/save “Automatically set as primary group” for the first time, all members will have their primary group set/overwritten with the new group
- If users are members of multiple groups that are set to “Automatically set as primary group”, you can go into the settings of one of them uncheck/save then recheck/save to set/override the primary group for all members.
Default Title
- Unlike the automatic primary group functionality, the default group titles are only applied to group members that do not have an existing title
- Removing a default title from a group will clear it from users that had it set as their title
So given all of the above, the order you add users to specific groups can be very important. It gets tricky if you don’t have control over the order a user joins groups, but you may be able to work something out knowing the behavior outlined above.
If there is a specific workflow you can’t achieve and would like to see supported, feel free to create a #feature topic so we can keep it under consideration.