Post in Group Members Page

2007 Oct 02 03:57 UTC

I hope I am not upsetting anyone. I take an extreme stance with privacy, as it
gets everyone to clearly state their cases, and I do not want any slip ups. I
do not mean anything harsh by it, and I am also very concerned with the
usability and utility of GroupServer.

Firstly to Steve's point about the take up of GroupServer. I strongly believe
that being *more* private will help us, rather than hinder. In our experience,
most groups are secret or private groups, rather than open ones. Indeed, the
public groups on
  http://forums.e-democracy.org/
and this group are unusual. For OnlineGroups.Net this is a bit annoying, as it
tends to make the sites look dead! It is quite amusing that we can spend so
long arguing about something that effects so few sites ☺

My concerns with Steve's suggestion is about change. The basic principal of
privacy is that you can disclose anything you want, so long as you ask. In
Steve's post, I implied the ability for the administrator being able to change
the privacy of the users without consent, which I object to. Richard's
suggestion about the user being able to explicitly set the privacy level is
where we do want to be in the end, but it is a long way off, unfortunately.

All in all we are in an excellent place, and I deeply appreciate the help you
are all giving me in sorting this out. There are two things that we agree on.
  1. No one is arguing about the visibility of Secret and Private groups.
  2. No one is worried about public announcement groups.
This leaves two cases of members-page visibility to sort out: public discussion
groups that anyone can join, and public discussion groups that have joining by
invitation only.

I will discuss the latter case first, as it seems easy! In a public discussion
group, with joining by invitation only, the members page has the following
visibility.
  * All members are shown to group members.
  * All members that have made a post are shown to non-members.
For the most part, the two sets will be the same, but it does allow for the
possibility of private lurking. The overall privacy is controlled by the group
administrator, who approves or disapproves invited members. Public discussion
groups with invitation only is an incredibility rare type of group, but it is
one we should support.

For public groups, that anyone can join, we have two options:
  1. The same as invitation-only groups, or
  2. All members are shown.
As Richard says
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/4fwZZc2O6eMV7t3fmC2LVo
it is quite easy to join a public group, which makes the first option silly.
So, for public groups I propose that all members are shown.

The visibility of profiles is another question entirely. I mention it, as we
should only show links to the users' profiles if the profile is visible. As I
said, the rules for the members page is more complex than you would imagine at
first ☺