News Feed

Communities thrive when members can self-organize around shared interests. With Social Groups, your users can create, discover, and participate in member-run spaces without any admin intervention.

Create a Group in Seconds.

Any member with permission can spin up a new group with a name, description, and optional rules. Groups get their own dedicated page with a customizable icon and cover image, giving each one a distinct identity.

Three Privacy Levels

Not every community needs to be open to everyone. Groups support three privacy modes:

• Public - Anyone can join instantly. Content is visible to all visitors.

• Private - Visible in listings, but users must submit a join request. Owners and moderators approve or deny each request.

• Secret - Completely hidden from non-members. Users can only join via a direct invitation.

Owners can also set a member capacity limit, and a visual capacity bar shows how full the group is.

Channels for Organized Discussion

Inside each group, owners and moderators can create channels to organize posts by topic: General, Announcements, Off-Topic, or anything that fits. Channels can be reordered with drag-and-drop and deleted when they're no longer needed (posts move back to the default feed automatically).

Each channel can override the group's default permissions, so you can lock an Announcements channel to moderator-only posting while keeping everything else open.

Rich Posts, Replies, and Reactions

Group posts use the same rich editor as the rest of your forum: formatted text, inline images, file attachments (up to 20 per post), and @mentions that fire real-time alerts. Members can reply to posts in threaded conversations and react with emojis.

Owners and moderators can pin important posts to the top of any channel.

Membership Management

Owners have full control over who's in and what they can do:

• Invite users directly by username

• Approve or deny join requests for private groups (with a count badge so nothing slips through)

• Promote active members to Moderator, or demote them back

• Remove members who break the rules

• Transfer ownership to another member when it's time to hand off the reins

The Members tab sorts everyone by role: Owner first, then Moderators, then Members, each with their join date visible.

Group Discovery

The Browse Groups page gives users multiple ways to find their people:

• Featured Groups section at the top, curated by site admins

• Category filtering so groups are organized by topic

• Privacy filter (Public / Private)

• Sort by Newest, Most Members, or Most Active

• Keyword search across group names

Each group card shows the cover image, privacy badge, member and post counts, a description preview, and a "NEW" indicator when there's unread activity.

Activity Feed

Members get a dedicated My Feed page that aggregates posts from every group they've joined into a single timeline. A dropdown lets them filter to a specific group, and each post shows a "new" indicator if it arrived after their last visit.

Group content also flows into the site-wide news feed, keeping the broader community aware of group activity.

Per-Group Permissions

Four toggleable permissions give owners fine-grained control over what members can do:

• Post - Create new top-level discussions

• Reply - Respond to existing posts

• Upload - Attach files to posts

• React - Add emoji reactions

These can be set at the group level and overridden per channel.

Admin Controls

Site administrators get their own panel for oversight:

• Browse and search all groups (including secret ones)

• Feature groups to promote them on the discovery page

• Delete groups that violate site rules

All admin actions are recorded in the audit log