Post in Group Members Page

This post carries on from the posts by Steve and Richard in the
“Validating feeds from searches, post by/about person, Latest posts” topic
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/3zTY3txKr4FyeF22vYurZT
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/E7MWs12qK6WyZdYkqzPzf
where they discuss the Group Members page.

There are two basic principals that govern the members page:
  1. Group members should be able to “lurk”, and
  2. Group members should be able know who will read the posts.
To be able to lurk, your name should never be mentioned, which is in
conflict with the second principal. In addition to the above requirements,
the main use of the members page is to answer the question “who is in this
group”. We suspect the user will ask this question as part of the
evaluation of a group, before joining.

To support these requirements we have devised the following rules for the
default GroupServer discussion and announcement groups.

  * In secret, private, and public groups, group members can view the
    group members page. All members of the group are visible to all the
    other members. Where appropriate, the number of posts made by each
    member is shown, along with a link to the appropriate search for that
    user in the group. For example, all posts by me in GroupServer
    Development
    http://groupserver.org/s/?g=development&a=michaeljasonsmith&t=0&p=1

  * In secret and private groups, the group members page is not visible to
    anonymous (logged out) users.

  * In public groups that are viewed by logged out users, only the users
    who have posted are shown on the group members page. The posting
    statics are shown, as well as the link to the appropriate for that user
    in the group.

In the generic case, the visibility of the group members page will be
based on the visiblity of the messages area.

Alice and I are working at rewriting the back-end code that is used to
generate the Web pages for a group. This is the “Creation of group-classes,
so the templates contain no logic” item in the roadmap
  http://groupserver.org/groupserver/roadmap/
We are working from the simple tasks — encoding the rules for joining and
leaving a group — towards the more complex, such as posting. Alice and I
naïvely asked Dan what the rules for the members page. It turns out that
the rules are (or should be) far far far more complex that you would
imagine at first!