Purpose of Usergroups

I've been looking at some ideas to boost traffic on my site. I came to realize that most activity on a community site should be user designed and user driven. For instance, back in the day, admin would create a forum and set various sub forums and people would use those set forums. Once in a while a new subforum might be created, but it was always up to the admin of the site to figure out what will attract traffic and what won't. I think these days it's different. I think these days it should be the community members that think up and create forums, and it's up to them to attract traffic to the forum(s) they created. Which brings us to Usergroups in Composr. Believe it or not, I'm still not clear what a usergroup is, except I understand the natural ascent that happens when people contribute content to the site, and therefore they go higher in usergroup level over time. That's clear. That's basically a ranking system, and it helps with determining privilege. I get that. But, when a random member created a Usergroup, is that basically just/only creating a new Forum? And I think the ability to create Polls?

Here's what I'm getting at. I think when a member creates a Usergroup, it should create a Space that contains a Forum, a Downloads and Uploads area, a Polls, a Chat Room, and all the other CMS things, all at once. Creating a Usergroup should be more like a macro command that creates all these things at the same time, all tucked away in an exclusive Space that nobody can access except the members of that Usergroup.  In fact, after a member creates a Usergroup, the Usergroup should have its own landing page, and the landing page can have its own little background or at least mini banner (between left and right panels, like a normal page).

Last bit here. Currently Usergroups on my site are, I think, not working. Or maybe it is working, but I'm thinking it does more than what it actually does. It seems to only create a forum that can be accessed from the forums area. It seems to me that going here, for instance:

https://witches.chat/index.php?page=groups&type=view&id=coffee-and-tea-club

Should take me to the forum, but it actually takes me to a page that says "There are no members yet." and "Resign from this usergroup" and "edit" — The usergroup has a few dozen people in it, though. So probably something is not working correctly.
 

But, when a random member created a Usergroup, is that basically just/only creating a new Forum? And I think the ability to create Polls?

You're thinking about what is advertised as Clubs in Composr. Creating Clubs is a front-end to 2 things:

1. A "Private club" usergroup
2. A forum with the same name (creating under the forum and forum grouping set in the main configuration)

[in your terms, a "macro command"]

Clubs can only be added from the cms_cns_groups module (in the CMS zone so potentially available to regular users, depending on permission configuration). Once created, the usergroup component can then also be edited as a usergroup from the admin_cns_groups module and you'll see a setting "Private club" is checked for it which isn't available ordinarily.

The "Private club" setting means permissions don't exist for the usergroup. It just exists to group members, not to have permissions set against it.

This is for practical reasons. A site may want hundreds of clubs set up, but we don't want hundreds of usergroups listed when setting the permissions for things, and we don't want them slowing down Composr's performance.

The "Private club" flag also works for Composr to know to list it as ediable in the cms_cns_groups module (regular usergroups won't be listed in there).

Here's what I'm getting at. I think when a member creates a Usergroup, it should create a Space that contains a Forum, a Downloads and Uploads area, a Polls, a Chat Room, and all the other CMS things, all at once.

We do have a feature for that, Aggregate Content Types, but it's complex and requires configuring with XML. I'd only recommend it for programmers willing to dive into the code to see how it works. It's probably not very user-friendly for users to use too and probably would need some extra custom programming to make it viable.

For something more user-friendly, we have a long-standing tracker issue, but it's a lot of work: 0002884: Club content - Composr CMS feature tracker
It could be chipped away at of course, but with something like this different people are going to want different things.

Last bit here. Currently Usergroups on my site are, I think, not working. Or maybe it is working, but I'm thinking it does more than what it actually does. It seems to only create a forum that can be accessed from the forums area. It seems to me that going here, for instance:

Usergroups - Witches Chat

Should take me to the forum

I'll have to check on that, I can't remember the behaviour wrt the forum linkage OTTOMH.

The usergroup has a few dozen people in it, though. So probably something is not working correctly.

There have been a few bugs here that have been fixed in the latest patch release.

If you want to manually patch, grabbing the following files from Git (Files · master · Composr ecosystem / Composr · GitLab) should fix it:

• site/pages/modules/groups.php
• sources/cns_groups2.php
• sources/forum/cns.php

Take backups of any file being replaced before replacing

Me said

I'll have to check on that, I can't remember the behaviour wrt the forum linkage OTTOMH.

As long as you have added an actual Club, not just a regular usergroup, you should see an Activity section when you view it that shows any topics in the forum and an add topic link.

Okie dokie, I patched in those 3 files and it now shows the members in the Club/Usergroup when you go to the link. That's working good. Off on a tangent in a way here, but here's some comcode that displays the recent forum activity for a given list of forums. this argument here:

forum="2,5,9,11,12,14,25,17,18,13,30,40,51"

Is there a wildcard option for this argument? So that it includes all forums? Otherwise, as new forums are added, this argument will have to be edited with each new forum.

something like

forum="*"

Or perhaps there is some comcode that would do this:

forum="{$ALL_MEMBER_GROUPS,{$MEMBER}}"



 

Okay, so for clarity we're talking about the 'forum' parameter of the main_forum_news block here.

That parameter is Selectcode. A comma-separated list is a very basic usage of Selectcode, but you can do all kinds of things.
* should work yes.
But you can also do things like "Everything under a certain forum", e.g. 3* would be everything under forum #3. I can't remember if that includes forum 3 or not, but Selectcode is thoroughly documented in its tutorial.