Totara Social Open Discussions

Hiding a Community

We have a community on our TS that is linked to a course in the LMS that runs on a 6 monthly cycle. So every 6 months we want to hide the community and start a new one with the new course members. However we wish to retain the old one for admin purposes so that we can re-use some of the forum content etc.

Is it possible to 'hide' the old community so it is only accessible to admins and the members are removed from the community?

Alternatively is it possible to close the community without deleting it?

Thanks

Kate

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Hi Kate,

Would suspending the users in question work?

cheers,

George.

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Would we be suspending the users from the whole site? They may also be members of other groups within our community.

We ended up manually removing the 100+ members from the group. It would be great to have an easy way to hide / close a group (without having to delete it), like can be done with courses on the LMS.

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Hi Kate,

Removing users from a group is not something I would recommend. In such case there might be an issue with deciding what happens to all the content they created and the discussions they participated in.

We do have a feature request already filed that sounds very similar to what you need:

TS-999 Closed/archived groups:

Everything has to end at some time. Say a group needs to close, maybe the group was a 'project' group or a 'course' group. The group admin at an appropriate point should just be able to close the group. The content would be available as read only, but such groups would not appear in sharing, or suggestions, or in list of current user groups. People will be able to search for content and the group itself in global search, but won't be able to post to the group, participate in forums, ask questions, etc.

Please let me know if this sounds about right and I will add your +1 to this ticket.

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Hi Yulia

I think the featured that you mention will be useful in some cases. However I still think it would be good to have the ability to completely hide a community from users without deleting it.

In our use case we run a exam prep course every 6 months that will have a community group attached to it. The access to that community and the information in it is restricted to current course participants. So when the course is complete we want to be able to close the community so that participants no longer have any visibility of it.

Thanks

Kate

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Hi Kate,

This sounds like a very specific use case. The goal of groups is to bring people together, let them communicate, interact, and share information. They are not designed to manage people or hide information from people who are a part of the group.

Trying to understand your background, why would you prefer that people to never access information they have potentially created/contributed to/used in the past? Wouldn't creating anew group in this case be a more suitable approach?

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I see your point.

However we are taking advantage of the feature where the groups are linked to courses and users enrolled in a particular course are added to the relevant group. The courses that we are running that use the groups are for 6 months. So the discussions, forums and sharing of information etc is specific to the course that it is linked to. When the course is complete the activity / information in the community is no longer current / relevant.

We set up a new community when a new course starts so we want the old one to close. Otherwise we are will end up with multiple exam prep groups within the community.

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