Feature #22138
openNew Privacy Setting for Groups
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Description
Hi All,
Following up on the team meeting on Friday 2/14 and our discussion of group member defaults.
Do we want to make a privacy setting for groups that falls in between private and public? This would allows group content and members lists to be visible to logged in commons members only and not visible to non-logged in visitors.
Currently there is Public, Private, and Hidden privacy settings for groups.
In Public groups: group listing in directory, forums, member lists, events can be viewed by any one.
In Private groups: group listing in directory can be viewed by anyone; forums, member lists, events can be viewed only by group members
In Hidden Groups: not searchable in directories; forums, member lists, events can be viewed only by group members.
We proposed creating a Semi-Public setting: group listing in directory can be viewed by anyone; forums, member lists, events can be viewed only by group members.
Rationale: there is value in group content being public only to CUNY folks - can view events, forum posts, get info, and determine if they want to join the group. Moreover, there is not always a need for group content to be completely public, as public visitors cannot respond to forums and join groups etc.
Relatedly, a "semi-public" (public to logged in users) would also provide another layer of privacy fro group members since anyone on the internet would not be able to see the membership lists for a group. For example, (in this political climate) I can see how it might be helpful if the membership list for any DEI, Anti-racism groups on the Commons are not completely public.
If we do move forward with a semi-public group privacy setting option, we should not change any setting of current groups but instead do outreach to group admins that this new feature is now available and provide rationale for why admins might change their privacy settings.
Updated by Laurie Hurson about 1 month ago
Also - I feel like there may be a need for another ticket with a differentiated aspect about bolstering group privacy - maybe bulk hiding member lists from logged out users? But I cannot remember exact details and if this was supposed to be separate ticket. If so please let me know and I can write up the other ticket.
Updated by Colin McDonald about 1 month ago
Thanks for this overview, Laurie. Regarding your follow-up about whether we might bulk hide member lists from logged-out users, we did discuss this but leaned I think toward not making a blanket change that would impact existing groups.
I do think there's an argument to be made that the semi-public option could be the default selection when you go to create a new group (the default is public right now), to protect anyone who breezes through the creation steps.
The semi-public rationale looks good to me and tracks with my notes from Friday. How should semi-public work as far as being able to join? Is it the same as public, where any member can join automatically, or is it like private and I believe hidden where you request to join and then need to be approved?
Are there any other technical differences between the three privacy settings we should be considering here?
On Friday we also discussed adapting Open Lab tools where a user can individually hide their memberships across all groups they belong to, but that would be more complex than the group-level changes. Perhaps we could explore this later.