Group

This page explains functions available to group administrators. To have access to these functions, you have to be a administrator of at least one group.

Create a New Group

Click on the green plus (+) sign next to Sub-groups subtitle. The sub-groups box will appear either in the right column if a group already has less than nine sub-groups, or in a separate section on the bottom of the page if there are more than eight sub-groups.

Choose a title for the new group, a name, and an optional description. The title and the description will appear in the group directory, and will help potential members decide whether to join yor group or not.

The name of a group consists only of letters, numbers and dashes, and in addition to becoming part of the URL, it will also be used as the left side of the group email address. The name will appear as well in the beginning of a subject of every message sent from this group.

Only administrators can add new groups.

Once group is created, you can enter it by clicking on its name in a list of sub-groups, and then click on Settings to customize its settings.

Group Settings

Title is a human friendly title for your group. This title will appear in a group directory. Preferably it should be descriptive enough to entice someone to look into group’s content or to remember what the group is about.

Name is how the group will be addressed on the Internet. This is the address you will share to users so that they can access the group. The URL must be unique within Dgroups.

Group email address serves to submit discussion items via email. Enter a full email address in the form name@dgroups.org. Group membership determines the security level of your group, or in other words, how can one gain access to group content.

Invisible to the users of the system is useful when one needs to hide a group – for example when using a group for team communication about financial issues, etc. A hidden group does not allow unsolicited membership requests, nor does the group appear in group directory. The only way to know of the group existence is to be invited as a member. Use this type of group for small groups.

If a group is not invisible, then its content is visible only to its members, but any non-member can request to join, and administrators can invite other users to join. Non-members know of existence of a group, but cannot access its content, nor can contribute content.

Read only group does not allow any contributions, except requests for membership and requests to create sub-groups. One would create a read-only group as a root group for other users to request sub-groups.

Content security has a few additional facets one can apply to a group:

  • A group can accept email from unregistered senders – normally, only group members can email discussions to a group. Sometimes, however, it makes sense to allow anyone to send messages to group’s email address – for example if a group is used for support, or one wants to survey a group of people for certain answers without requiring people to create a profile. Messages from non-members are always moderated, regardless of group’s moderation settings. This is a spam prevention measure.

  • One can also show list of group members so that other members can see who else is involved in a group. The list contains names, titles, and countries of group members, and does not expose sensitive details such as email address. Not showing the member list makes sense when dealing with sensitive topics, or if members belong to competing commercial organizations.

  • Most of the time, email notifications are distributed only with links to documents, to prevent large attachments clogging people’s mailboxes and slowing down their connection. Clicking on a link might require a log in to the system, which many users find annoying and unnecessary, especially if a document is not highly sensitive. Ticking do not require login for document download will allow email recipient to click on a link in the message and immediately start document download. The document statistics in that case might show anonymous download – that is, the system might not be able to tell you who exactly downloaded the document.

  • Ticking content available to unauthorized users (read-only) will expose all content to everyone on the Internet. The pages will look the same as to a group member, but will be read-only – that is, non-members will be able to browse all group content, but only members will be able to contribute. This setting is useful if the group has implications for the wider audience, in which case membership primarily serves as spam-prevention measure.

  • A group can use a specific default language of the user interface and messages in email notifications and invitations. This setting does not determine the language of member-contributed content. A member is still able to contribute content in any language. The language designator, however, might indicate to users browsing the directory the content of this group (even though this would usually be evident from title and description already). Leave on Automatic to let users' browser or language preference decide on the language of the user interface and use English as a default language for email footers and invitations. User’s choice of a user interface language will take precedence over this setting when browsing the group web site.

Tools

Tools determine the content type a member can contribute to a group. A administrator can limit contributions to only certain type of content by checking off some of the boxes next to the content type.

Moderated group requires approval for all member content contributions. One can choose to moderate all content all the time, or only first contribution of each user. Once a member’s contribution has been approved, future contribution from that member do not require administrator approval and are visible to all group members immediately.

RSS

Often, an organization wants to share Dgroups content on the intranet, or on a project web page. The preferred means of automatic distribution of Dgroups content is through RSS. The RSS section lists URLs for selectively sharing group content. Long numbers at the end of the URL allow intranet or web servers to log in automatically into Dgroups and read the appropriate RSS feed, without requiring a separate username and password (which complicates programming for those implementing the intranet or a web page).

SECURITY NOTE Do not share these links with users – each user has own personalized links for reading group RSS.

Delete a Group

To delete a group, open Settings dialog and confirm deletion on Delete tab. Once a group is deleted, all its content becomes inaccessible.

All sub-groups of a deleted group are deleted as well.