Group links widget not showing option to join group

Hi everyone, 

I'm stumped on this configuration issue in my 11.1.2 site and have made little progress on all troubleshooting attempts:

  • I have a Private (Listed) group available to only a subset of our community members (just our Partners and Employees, not customers)
  • Permissions are configured for the role of my test user (and real users I've tested with) to allow the user to read and join the group (All "employee" and "partner" roles have access to read and contribute to the group are not required to join):
  • The Group Links widget is placed on the group's home page, as well as other places around the group:

At this point, everything is set up the way I'd expect to work properly. I ran into and fixed one issue where the "Click here..." banner wasn't showing at the bottom of the page either. I found in this thread that the group join banner is part of the Group Banner widget which I had also removed from this group. I replaced it (and added a bunch of CSS changes to re-hide it, but still use the functionality) which caused the bottom banner to show. However, thie Group Links widget does not show for non-members. From there, more troubleshooting:

  • Changed the group from Private (Listed) to Private (unlisted) and back
  • Checked permissions across all applications, Site and Group roles, etc to confirm correct configuration
  • Checked where the widget SHOULD be in "Inspect Element" in Chrome to make sure it wasn't being hidden by some of the CSS customizations I've made in this group

The odd part is that when I join the group (as my test user), the option to leave the group appears. Then, the widget is gone again:

Finally, I checked  Release Notes for Community 11 to see if there are any fixed bugs since we're on such an old version, but I couldn't find anything.

Does anyone have any ideas why the logic of the Group Links widget's Join functionality would be different than the Group Banner's? 

Parents Reply
  • Well I can say I see the same as you! The banner at the bottom would inform a user they need to join to participate, but the Groups-Links widget seems to have some other logic going on. Will ask around why that is.

    Taking a step back now - why would you like it set up this way? If assigning a role to be able to see the group - why not add as a member via the role? Gauge engagement of a user actually joining on their own after seeing the content? Thanks for expanding!

Children
  • Thanks   and  ! 

    Mathew - Thanks for putting that code together! I'll give this a shot with some testing and see if I need to make any changes. It looks good to me, but I trust your untested code more than my reading the untested code Smiley I'll report back what I find. 

    Grant - 

    Taking a step back now - why would you like it set up this way? If assigning a role to be able to see the group - why not add as a member via the role? Gauge engagement of a user actually joining on their own after seeing the content? Thanks for expanding!

    Adding all members of the role as group members is where I'd love to get to someday, but there are a few limitations:

    • This is a private group for our partner network, and that would auto-subscribe ANYONE who works at a partner company to the group. That network can be extensive and would include community members who are not necessarily on our site for "partner content." The content in this group is more focused at sales/marketing roles, so if a developer who works for a partner (company) joins our site, they'd be inundated with that sales/marketing content.   
      • In addition, as a company, we have multiple types of partners (I want to say 7?), so different partner types have access to different applications in the group.   
    • I have the  Subscribe Users To Group Applications automation set up on this group, so that's in a sense "forcing" extra notifications on the aforementioned audience ^
    • We just re-launched this group with a new UI/UX about a month ago. The old UI/UX was "not great" so it was something that was swept under the rug a little. Now that the refresh is done I would be more open to auto-joining people, as would my group stakeholders. We want to finish some outstanding tasks/projects first though. 
    • Due to the way we handle SSO (both from our company and our connector to our community), I'm unsure of some of the possible long-term effects, so I'd want to do a little more testing that I haven't had a chance to do yet. 

    Overall, the structure has worked pretty well for us, minus some smaller side effects like this. If you ever want to see the end-to-end processes in more detail to understand the use case(s), I'm happy to show you. 

  • If you ever want to see the end-to-end processes in more detail to understand the use case(s), I'm happy to show you. 



    I'll shoot a message!