Virtual member groups - a more comprehensive solution

[Cyboman]

Regular member groups shouldn't be overloaded and not every incident can trigger a group promotion or demotion event. There are a lot situations, in which the regular "member group" dimensions don't offer enough space or functionality for advanced actions. Sometimes there is a quick temporary requirement, other times the creation effort would be too high (too many steps, too many insecurities, too many alterations) to maintain such special regular groups.

I'm just thinking about a higher comprehensive concept, where admins can define virtual member groups, that can be used like every regular member group in the ACP member permissions settings in ALL applications and plugins. Once the concept has been realized, all our app/plugin authors/developers wouldn't require special coding methods to query for all the conditions and variables again and again. Virtual member groups make admin lifes easier as well as developers lifes.  

Where to use virtual member groups?

F.e. in

• Bulk mailings. I want to send out mailings only to members, that belong to group A, but not to B. B should explicitly not be addressed. Hence I require A WITHOUT B!
• Honoring bulk email opt-ins. I want to permit members for 3rd party plugins, if they are in group A OR B, but only those, who opted into the bulk email. This virtual member group will only be used in other applications/plugins, that can't query such field values. As field values change a lot of times presumely, a task for creating the virtual member group will guarantee the up-to-dateness of the member group.
• 18+ areas. I want to create virtual groups, that belong to group A, but may not be kids. But members might enter wrong birthdays or no birthdays, so this must be properly checked from time to time.
• Mailing to inactive members. I want to sendout mailings to members, that haven't been logged into the community for 10 days, AND that have bought products in the shop during the last 30 days.
• Filtering for special custom profile fields. Profile fields tell us the important individual information of all communities, and profile fields might change from time to time. Virtual member groups will recognize these changes.
• Query for member location. List all member in group C but only the ones that entered "Los Angeles" (and maybe even a 100 miles radius). Addresses also might change from time to time...

Why?

Virtual groups are a more finegrained solution towards member queries, that can be deduced by already existing regular member groups or other profile informations, extended by other query functionality, that will change continuously (requires special query tasks in the background)

It's just an idea, and maybe it inspires anyone, IPS or a 3rd party app/plugin developer, to create such a massive improvement to the overall member group concept.

[Janyour]

+1

very smart solution !