Creating and deleting a group

Any signed-in user may create a group, unless the hub's administrators have taken the privilege away from your access group. Deleting one needs a group manager.

Creating a group

Make a group when a set of people need somewhere on the hub that is theirs: an address to send collaborators to, a forum that is not everyone's forum, a file area, a wiki, a list of the papers the work produced. You do not need permission and you do not need to know how much of it you will use — the tabs are switches you can turn on later.

This page follows one group the whole way through: soilcarbon, a soil carbon project running across four institutions. Its principal investigator wants the project's protocols and meeting notes in one place, wants people to be able to ask to join rather than be chased individually, and does not want the group turning up in hub searches while the funding is still unannounced.

1. Sign in and go to /groups.
2. Select Create New Group.
3. Fill in the form and select Save Group.

The form is one page, in these sections. Everything on it except the Group ID can be changed afterwards, so it is not a form to agonise over.

Group Details

Field	What it is
Group ID	Required. The group's address: /groups/<Group ID>. Lowercase letters, digits and underscores only, no spaces, and not digits alone. A handful of names are reserved. It cannot be changed afterwards
Title	Required. The name people see
Interests (tags)	Optional. Comma-separated tags. They make the group findable by search and put it in front of members whose profile interests match

Those three rows are the only ones Hubzero puts there itself. There is no description box among them: the fixed Public Description and Private Description boxes groups used to have are gone from the form, and the hub's custom fields replaced them. Whatever your hub's administrators have defined appears beneath Interests (tags), and the answers are what the group's Overview tab shows under About the Group.

On most hubs that means the two descriptions are still there, because the upgrade turns them into custom fields of the same names and moves the old text across. But they are now ordinary fields: an administrator can rename them, reorder them, add others — a funding source, a principal investigator, a department — or take them away entirely. So the questions you are asked when you create soilcarbon are your hub's questions, not a fixed list, and another hub's form looks different.

Each field also has its own audience, set when it was defined: some are shown to anyone at all, some only to people signed in to the hub, some only to members of the group. Public Description is the first kind and Private Description the last. The form does not label which is which, so if you are about to type something you would not want read by a stranger, ask the hub's support staff before you put it in a field you are unsure of.

Membership Settings/Join Policy

This is the decision that matters most, and it is not about secrecy — it is about who does the work of deciding. Open/Anyone means nobody does: the group takes whoever turns up. Restricted puts a manager in the loop for every applicant. Invite Only means people cannot even ask. Closed means the membership is fixed as it stands.

soilcarbon picks Restricted. The project wants collaborators from outside the four institutions to be able to find it and ask, but it does not want to end up explaining its unpublished data to a stranger, and somebody has to read the request either way. That costs a manager a minute per applicant and nothing else.

Pick one, under Who can join?:

Policy	Effect
Open/Anyone	Membership requests are automatically accepted
Restricted	Membership requests are pending and must be approved or denied by a manager
Invite Only	Membership can only be gained through an invite
Closed	Membership cannot be requested

Credentials is an optional block of text shown to anyone requesting membership. Use it on a restricted group to say what an applicant should tell you — a project number, a principal investigator, and so on. It is the difference between requests you can act on and requests that say "please add me". soilcarbon uses it to ask for the applicant's institution and the name of the co-investigator who vouches for them.

You can change the policy at any time afterwards, and changing it does not disturb anybody who has already joined.

If the hub allows time-limited memberships, a Membership length section follows, where you set a default number of days after which new members are removed automatically. Leave it at 0 for memberships that never end. Changing it does not affect anyone who has already joined.

Privacy Settings

Discoverability and the join policy are separate questions, and it is worth seeing why. The join policy says who may get in; discoverability says whether the group can be found at all. A Visible, Restricted group is the usual arrangement — findable, but you have to ask. soilcarbon starts Hidden instead, because the award is not announced yet, and its manager switches it to Visible the week the press release goes out.

Discoverability is one of two values:

Value	Effect
Visible	The group can be found in searches and by browsing groups
Hidden	The group cannot be found through searches and is only viewable by group members

Access Permissions below it is where the group's shape is actually set. Every tab a group can have is listed, and each one is a separate decision about a separate audience. soilcarbon leaves Overview open to Any HUB Visitor so a collaborator can read what the project is before asking to join, and sets Files, Forum and Wiki to Group Members Only because that is where the unpublished work lives. The tabs it is not going to use — Blog, Wish List — go to Disabled/Off so the menu stays short.

The list itself is the hub's, not the group's: a tab you have heard of may be missing because your hub does not run that plugin. Everything here can be changed later, from Customization.

The full list of options: Set each one to Any HUB Visitor, Registered HUB Users, Group Members Only or Disabled/Off. Overview cannot be set to Disabled/Off. Anything already selected is the hub's default until you override it.

Group Email Settings

One checkbox, Auto subscribe new group users to discussion email. Tick it and new members start subscribed to the group's forum email; each of them can change it afterwards. See Group forum.

Page Settings

Field	What it does
Comments	Whether group pages show comments: No, Yes, or Lock (existing comments stay, no new ones). Each page can override it
Author Details	Whether each group page ends with a line naming its creator, its last editor and the date

After you save

The group is created, you become its first member and its first manager, and you land on the group's page.

That is the end of the form and the start of the work. soilcarbon now exists at /groups/soilcarbon with one member in it. Three things usually follow, in this order: promote a second manager so the group does not depend on one account, bring the members in, and write something on Overview so that people arriving know what they have found. The first two are in Member functions; the third is in Customization.

Whether the group is visible to anyone else depends on the hub. Most hubs approve new groups automatically. If yours does not, the group is saved unapproved: only its managers, members and invitees can reach it, everyone else gets a "not found", and the group's page carries a warning until an administrator approves it. Nobody but a manager can open any tab other than Overview in the meantime.

Deleting a group

Deleting is for a group that should never have existed — a typo in the Group ID, a duplicate, an experiment. It is almost never right for work that has finished, because a finished project's forum threads and wiki pages are exactly what somebody wants two years later. Read the alternative below before you go on.

Any manager can do it, and that is worth saying plainly: it is not reserved to whoever created the group, and there is no second manager's approval. If soilcarbon has three managers, any one of them can destroy it on their own. The counterweight is that it cannot be done quietly — every member is emailed that the group has gone and who removed it, and you write the message they get. So the check on the power is that everyone finds out, not that you are stopped.

You do not have to be the group's only member, and you do not have to empty it first.

1. Open the group.
2. Open the Group Manager menu and select Delete Group.
3. Read what the confirmation page lists. Under Are you sure you want to delete? it counts what will be lost: the number of members who will be notified, and a line from each of the group's plugins counting the blog entries, forum posts, wiki pages and other content that go with it. This is the only inventory you get, so take it seriously — a group that has been running for a year is usually holding more than its managers remember.
4. Type the group's Group ID in the confirmation box. The page asks for it by name: To prevent accidental actions we ask you to confirm your intent by typing "soilcarbon" below. Nothing else is accepted, and the point is that you cannot delete the wrong group by mistyping — you have to spell out the one in front of you.
5. Optionally edit Customize message sent to group member(s). Whatever you write is inserted into the mail every member receives, beneath a line saying the group was deleted by you. A sentence saying where the work went is worth the ten seconds.
6. Select Delete.

The confirmation page offers an alternative worth reading first, under Alternative to deleting: set the join policy to Closed and the discoverability to Hidden. The group then takes no new members and is invisible to everyone else, but its content is still there, and a manager can still reach it. For work that has simply ended, this is nearly always the right answer.

An administrator can also delete a group from the administrator interface; see Groups.