Hi, we have this issue wherein, we have members reported to us that they can see other clubs activities even though they are not part of that club/group.

Is there a work around on this? We need to make sure that members/users don't see any activities of clubs that they are not belong or part of the club.

-Allan

To give more context, members go to the "Latest Activity" view, and they say that they can see other clubs activities even though they are not part of the club.

Where trying to figure out on how we can solve this issue.

-Allan

What are the privacy settings of the club that people are seeing content from?  Some club settings allow seeing content even if they are not a member. 

And have you checked if it’s a closed club that a leader has not set a section to allow anyone to participate?

Edited December 28, 20231 yr by Randy Calvert

 

What are the privacy settings of the club that people are seeing content from?  Some club settings allow seeing content even if they are not a member. 

They are all Open

-Allan

Edited December 28, 20231 yr by Nigel Moore

With open clubs, anyone can see the content in it.  That I believe includes discoverability.  You might need to make it a closed or private club if you don’t want its content seen by non-club members. 

Edited December 28, 20231 yr by Randy Calvert

If you are worried about the activity stream only you could edit the various streams to filter out clubs also. 

Edited December 28, 20231 yr by Randy Calvert

 

If you are worried about the activity stream only you could edit the various streams to filter out clubs also. 

Where do I see this settings? The "Club Filter" ?

@Nigel Moore You need to edit the streams in ACP:

 

@Nigel Moore You need to edit the streams in ACP:

I'm in the ACP and I don't see that "Club Filter" settings

-Allan

ACP - System - Content Discovery - Streams 

Edit the default stream. 

 

ACP - System - Content Discovery - Streams 

Edit the default stream. 

Im sorry, im really missing something, I don't see the "Club filter", I already disable all 3rd party applications, and still dont see that setting

Let me ask you a quick question: is your admin account in at least 1 club?

 

I have looked at the code, and unless the member editing the stream is in at least 1 club, the field with the club options won't appear. I consider it a bug since IPS shouldn't check if the specific user is in any clubs from the ACP:

	/**
	 * Fetch our clubs and cache
	 *
	 * @return array
	 */
	protected function _getOurClubs()
	{
		if( static::$ourClubs === NULL )
		{
			static::$ourClubs = \IPS\Member\Club::clubs( \IPS\Member::loggedIn(), NULL, 'name', TRUE, array(), \IPS\Settings::i()->clubs_require_approval ? array( 'approved=1' ) : NULL );

			static::$ourClubs = static::$ourClubs ? iterator_to_array( static::$ourClubs ) : array();
		}

		return static::$ourClubs;
	}

 

For the admin dispatcher, they should pass NULL rather than \IPS\Member::loggedIn() as the first parameter.

 

Hello Marc, what is the bug? What we are after is that, are we able filter all activities except for the club's that I don't belong?

The bug is that menu option that I mentioned only shows in the ACP if you are viewing it from an account that is in a club. 

As a workaround until the bug is fixed, have your admin account join some random club. At that point it should see the option I posted to filter clubs. 

 

Ok, what about the original topic I posted? wherein you can see other clubs activities that you are not belong to? is that also a bug?

Thats by design based on the type of club that was created. If the club is open, the content is discoverable. You can read about the different types of clubs above.

If you don’t want it discoverable, have an admin join some random club (thus working around the bug) and then change the default stream to not include clubs in the result.  That achieves the outcome you are asking about. 

Edited January 2, 20241 yr by Randy Calvert

Sorry for all the back and forth questions @Randy Calvert @teraßyte & @Marc Stridgen

And, thanks for all your help so far. 

Here's some deeper context for what we're trying to achieve that might hopefully shed some more light on the situation (and maybe help us find a potential solution):

We have a very busy main forum and last year we noticed that there was a LOT of chatter in our main forums around specific products / vendors in our Industry. 

There are about 800 different products / vendors that serve our industry and conversations around these "product / vendor" were filling up the Latest Activity feeds of members for products that they weren't interested in. 

So, we decided to try and find a solution to allow our members to essentially "opt-in" to products / vendors that they were interested in seeing conversations / threads about. 

To do that, one of our (ex) team members started creating Clubs with the following naming convention:

"The <Product Name> User Group"

E.g. "The Microsoft User Group", "The Kaseya User Group" etc. 

Our whole goal for setting up these "User Group" Clubs like this was so that if a member was interested in say Microsoft content or Kaseya content, then they could click the JOIN button for that specific Club and immediately from that point onwards, posts / threads from inside that club would start showing up in their Latest Activity view. 

(without them needing to be approved by an Admin as there is no need to stop people from joining those clubs immediately)

For people that haven't joined the Club, no posts from inside that club will show up in their Latest Activity Feed (ever). 

Up until last week, we thought this system was working as originally intended. 

(I personally don't use the Latest Activity view myself as I use my own Custom Streams, so I didn't know that content from Clubs I wasn't in was showing in my Latest Activity Feed)

However, last week we had a member report to us that they have been seeing posts in their Latest Activity feed from within clubs that they hadn't joined.

They originally thought it was intended behavior so hadn't reported to us before, but were wondering why it was happening. 

Since then, a bunch of other members have joined in saying they are seeing it as well and so we started investigating and realized that it doesn't appear that we've set it up in the way we originally thought it would work. 

(I suspect the ex team member might not have tested it properly when all the first Clubs were rolled out and our members have just "put up with it" since then until recently when some of the clubs started getting quite promotional)

So, our question here is, is there a way to have Clubs that have the following attributes:

1. They can be seen in the Club Listing by anyone who clicks on it
2. Any member can click the JOIN button and immediately be joined to the club (without requiring a manual approval process - we have 100's of clubs and 10,000+ members)
3. If a member is NOT joined to a Club, none of the posts from within that club will show in their Latest Activity feed
4. If a member DOES join a Club, from that moment onwards all posts from within that club will show in their Latest Activity feed

Any help is much appreciated 🙏

There wouldn't be a way in which to do this without someone having to approve them. However, I do have an alternative idea for you.

Have you thought about using commerce perhaps? This way you can use forums as you intended in the first place, rather than clubs. So using your scenario above you could create either a subscription or a product, with $0 value with the name "Microsoft user group". Create a group that is added as a secondary group when a user "purchases" that item, which also gives access to x forums content.

 

There wouldn't be a way in which to do this without someone having to approve them.

Darn, ok - thanks for the reply - appreciate it 🙏 

I think the best outcome here is for us to change all the groups to CLOSED and get our dev team to build a way (perhaps via a 60 second cron job) to auto-approve any requests directly via direct DB calls as they happen. 

(understand this wouldn't be supported)

 

Have you thought about using commerce perhaps? This way you can use forums as you intended in the first place, rather than clubs. So using your scenario above you could create either a subscription or a product, with $0 value with the name "Microsoft user group". Create a group that is added as a secondary group when a user "purchases" that item, which also gives access to x forums content.

Thanks for offering an alternative, however with 100's of existing clubs and the way we've designed and positioned the Clubs (we call them Mini-Tribes as part of our "Tech Tribe" company branding), this would be quite a drastic change.

Clubs have a bunch of additional advantages with all the other Features that can be turned on in individual ones. 

Edited January 4, 20241 yr by Nigel Moore

 

However, last week we had a member report to us that they have been seeing posts in their Latest Activity feed from within clubs that they hadn't joined.

I'm a heavy user of clubs on one of my Invision communities and wanted to provide some more information / clarification:

1.  All members of your greater community are immediately and automatically members of Open & Public clubs.  Those club types are, by definition, open and exposed to the entire community by default.  It's literally in the name of the club type 🙂 . The difference between them is whether or not you need to join to post, but you will always view the content.  

Streams, by default, show all available content that members can see.  This means they will see club content from Open & Public clubs, by default.

2.  I am not a fan of editing the filter for Streams, because if you exclude club content, it will ALWAYS exclude club content even after they join the club.  My assumption is that when members join the Microsoft club, they would want to see the Microsoft club in their stream when they return in the future.   

3.  I personally think your best solution is Closed clubs, which will more than suffice for your use case.  By default, users (for example, brand new members to your overall community) will not see any content from any Closed club until they specifically join Closed clubs.  Which is what you want.  Everyone is happy.      

Even though Marc is correct that clubs of Private type will always prevent any public content, I want to explain that in order for Closed clubs to expose  public content, the club owner would have needed to intentionally define that section to show public content.  Don't do that, duh!  Slap the hand of your club owner if he tries to define a new section that "anyone can view."  If you stay away from the options of letting a section intentionally become public, then the content of your Closed club will stay private. Which is what you want.  Members join the club, they see the content.  Members who don't join the club, won't see the content. 

Make content public? appears when you add a new section for Topics in a Closed Club.  

I am not a fan of Private clubs and want to add a clear warning that Private clubs won't even show on the club list, so you lose all discoverability.  It's literally hidden. It's like a private, hidden, secret club that is invite-only, and you will only see the club after you accept an invite. If you stick with Closed clubs, the club name and description will appear on the list of clubs, and members can browse the vendor user group they want.  

As you identified, the one custom coding you would need is to auto-approve member requests to join the closed clubs.  

4.  Some additional tips:

• You can choose to let club content areas co-exist with the normal content areas. For example, club forums that members joined can appear in your community Forums, and will append at the bottom.  This allows your community to commingle content and makes it easier for your users to browse and participate, instead of needing to go specifically to the Clubs app.   

From a behavioral standpoint, this option is great once it's been set up.  But users will need to navigate to Clubs app in the beginning. If you want to encourage discoverability, I would recommend you create a new forum of Redirect type, which directs users from the community Forum to the Clubs.  

• If you have that many clubs, you may want to think about defining Extra Fields that can be filterable on the front-end.  This could be things like industry vertical, industry application, user groups, etc.  

5. Even though I've been talking about Clubs ad nauseum, I think it's important to holistically ask if Clubs is the appropriate solution if the only thing you're needing it for is discussion. Clubs are not another tool, it's an entire kit of tools. Just be aware that from a user's behavioral standpoint, Clubs introduces a layer of user complexity.

Edited January 5, 20241 yr by Joel R

Great post @Joel R and you've confirmed everything we were thinking / planning - much appreciated 🙏

 

I personally think your best solution is Closed clubs

Agreed and at this stage, our plan is to change all those OPEN clubs to PRIVATE and our Dev team is scoping up an Auto-Approve process, likely using MariaDB triggers with some filtering in place so members can immediately join the club without having to wait for approval. 

 

want to explain that in order for Closed clubs to expose  public content, the club owner would have needed to intentionally define that section to show public content.  Don't do that, duh!

Yes, we definitely won't be doing that - the dev team tested on Friday changing a club from OPEN to PRIVATE and confirmed that this option stays as "Club members can view and participate" so we're all good there 🙃

Thanks for the warning.
 

 

For example, club forums that members joined can appear in your community Forums, and will append at the bottom.

Thanks and yup, we've already got this turned ON so that all the Clubs a member has joined show up down the bottom of their main forum page. It's a great feature 🙂

 

If you want to encourage discoverability, I would recommend you create a new forum of Redirect type, which directs users from the community Forum to the Clubs.

GREAT IDEA - we'll do that ASAP as soon as we change all the Club types. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

If you have that many clubs, you may want to think about defining Extra Fields that can be filterable on the front-end.  This could be things like industry vertical, industry application, user groups, etc.  

Another great idea, we'll have a think about best categories, but even something simple for now as a TYPE one that includes "Vendor User Group" and "Accountability Group" will be a great option to add. 

We could go deeper into sub-industry classifications as we grow the number of User Groups. 

Thanks again for the suggestion!

 

I am not a fan of Private clubs and want to add a clear warning that Private clubs won't even show on the club list, so you lose all discoverability.  It's literally hidden. It's like a private, hidden, secret club that is invite-only, and you will only see the club after you accept an invite.

We actually also have about 300 x PRIVATE Clubs that are used for small accountability groups (we have matched about 1500 of our members into small peer groups). These PRIVATE clubs definitely don't show up in any lists unless someone is Invited to them and they work great for that purpose. But they definitely wouldn't work for our "Vendor User Groups" feature. 

Thanks for all your input here @Joel R - much appreciated !!