Release

Hidden groups now available

Related products: CC Groups
Hidden groups now available

We are pleased to announce that hidden groups are now available! Thank you @justine.rae for suggesting the following idea :nerd:

This feature is available for customers on the inSided Business Package and above.

 

What are hidden groups?

Hidden group are groups that are only visible to its members. Only personally invited users can see and join a hidden group. Only the members of a hidden group can see its content. 

Hidden groups are the most secure group type compared to public and private groups. They can be used to discuss topics that should be seen only by selected users. You should create a hidden group if you want only specific users to know the existence of that group and see the content within the group.

You can invite users to become members of hidden groups by personally inviting them by email. 

 

With hidden groups you can:

  • Have a specific group for VIP, Super users, partners where they can discuss freely
  • Have a group to discuss Beta features
  • Have groups for the all users of a same company

 

How to start using hidden groups?

Start by reading this article that explains the difference between the different group types to decide what group type fit the most your use case.

Except for the differences of visibility and invite settings, hidden groups work very similarly to public and private groups. Listed below are a few articles to get started:

As always, please let us know if you have any additional questions or feedback.

Oh, this is amazing! We’ve recently been discussing a few initiatives for our customer facing teams and this just ups the notch in what we can do 🧨

 

Hope to try this out soon, and provide feedback. ☺️


Hello @Beachball3000 great to hear! I would love to hear your feedback indeed :)


Love this feature @Marion Frecaut - very useful. Looking forward to all the other improvements coming up for Groups :)


Coming from a brand new Community, I love this feature!

Currently we have the Groups option hidden as we do not have any groups. If we plan on setting up a hidden group how will those users access the group?

Seems like if we make the Groups option visible in the Mega Menu, this becomes visible to all public users as well. 

Anyone have any insights or suggestions into this?


Do you think it is possible for you to enable possibility to share link to the hidden group as well? Just like private groups.

Also, I would like to see possibility to import members feature as well. For example 100 / 1000 / 10 000 members, it is hard to invite so huge number of members, individually. But importing them using Excel sheet or so would be nice.

And last, I would like to see possibility to remove all the members at once. I dont want to delete group, there are situations when I want just remove the members there.


Sorry but I have fourth wish as well:

I would like to have possibility to build several groups, groups under categories. With this solution it is easier to outline the community structure, mostly groups arent related with each other so why to have them in one place and one place only.

Today situation is that all the groups are in one place / groups are one “category” today.


Coming from a brand new Community, I love this feature!

Currently we have the Groups option hidden as we do not have any groups. If we plan on setting up a hidden group how will those users access the group?

Seems like if we make the Groups option visible in the Mega Menu, this becomes visible to all public users as well. 

Anyone have any insights or suggestions into this?

Heya @David To , 
I believe that there’s a way to set certain permissions for the mega menu based on user rank/permissions. There’s an article on the mega menu that goes into this here: 

 @Marion Frecaut mentions:  

permissions apply to the Mega Menu for the Ideation and Product updated modules. For each end user, their permissions will condition whether they see the link to those modules in the Mega Menu. :grinning:


Hope that points you in the right direction! 
-Cass. 


Hello @David To and thanks you @Casstastr0phee for replying. Indeed the Mega Menu handle it directly. 
Here is a recap of the situation:

If the visibility of the Groups module is turned on in the Mega Menu, the link should be visible to an end user if one of the following conditions is filled:

  • At least one public or private group exists. In that case all users see the groups in the group detail page

  • If there are only hidden groups, the user is a member of at least one hidden group

  • If there are only hidden groups, the user is an admin, community manager or moderator

Long story short, if you have only hidden groups only the members of those hidden groups, admins, community managers or moderators will see the link to groups in the Mega Menu

 


Hello @revote thanks a lot for all those ideas, I would recommend creating ideas in our ideation module so other can vote as well. 

Some of you ideas already exist so you can simply vote on those:

 


Hello @revote thanks a lot for all those ideas, I would recommend creating ideas in our ideation module so other can vote as well. 

Some of you ideas already exist so you can simply vote on those:

 

 

 

Thanks, I’ll vote if someone grants access to the Ideas category :) 


Can you create an event for a Hidden group? It looks like only the private groups are showing as options to select and not my hidden one.


Hello @erin.brisson publishing events in hidden groups is currently not available. De didn't prioritised it as we wanted to improve some other UI elements in the events module before then. This is something we will at some point, at this time I am not sure when. I can recommend creating an idea for it to help get this request some visibility. 

Thanks!


Thanks @erin.brisson for creating the idea for hidden group events: 
 

 

+1 that we think this would be super impactful for our Community, as we have many new and/or beta groups not ready to reveal publicly yet, so we don’t want to field requests to join, but want to house events for existing members of those hidden groups.