Hi all,

When I moved our organisation's lists over from Yahoo! Groups a few years ago, I created everything as separate groups, so we now have 26 different groups in groups.io.

The groups all have slightly different memberships, but there is a lot of crossover. We have some groups that are public (can be joined with no approval) and some that need approval (we check that you're a member of our organisation before letting you in)

It sounds like it might be a good idea to have one main group and then make all of our discussion groups subgroups. (It sounds like that's how I should have done it in the first place.)

Why? For one thing, we're considering using Auth0 for single sign-on authentication (under their non-profit plan) and it seems that groups.io would require each group to be on the Enterprise plan to get the integration. That would add up to a LOT of money for our very small organisation.

Also it seems that administration might be easier, for me and for our members.

So, is there a way to move a regular group to become a sub-group of another group? I couldn't find anything in the Owners Manual or help pages.

Thanks,

Brendan.?

On Wed, May 4, 2022 at 08:59 AM, Brendan Quinn wrote:

The groups all have slightly different memberships, but there is a lot of crossover. We have some groups that are public (can be joined with no approval) and some that need approval (we check that you're a member of our organisation before letting you in)

It sounds like it might be a good idea to have one main group and then make all of our discussion groups subgroups. (It sounds like that's how I should have done it in the first place.)

Brendan -- Perhaps so, if it makes sense for your organizational structure. The biggest "gotcha" is that everyone must become of member of the main group before (or at the same time as) they join a subgroup. This can lead to difficulties with people posting to the "wrong" group by accident and/or managing all the subgroup memberships.

Optimally, you might have subgroups in place for [say] the organization's board of directors, subcommittees, SIGs within the main topic, etc. so that such folks can discuss tangential subjects. Most of the message traffic would occur in the main group.

Not saying that you can't make things work in some other fashion, but this is the way it's all designed. See?/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/1039#Examples?for some examples.

Why? For one thing, we're considering using Auth0 for single sign-on authentication (under their non-profit plan) and it seems that groups.io would require each group to be on the Enterprise plan to get the integration. That would add up to a LOT of money for our very small organisation.

Agreed that 26 Enterprise groups doesn't make a lot of sense in this context and would be prohibitively expensive.

Also it seems that administration might be easier, for me and for our members.

I have not found this to be the case. If anything, you'll probably find it to be more rigid (and difficult for members to wrap their heads around), when it comes to keeping track of everyone's subscriptions. But perhaps the Auth0 opportunity would override this...I have insufficient experience with it to advise on that.

So, is there a way to move a regular group to become a sub-group of another group? I couldn't find anything in the Owners Manual or help pages.

Normally, no. However, in the past Mark (owner of groups.io) has occasionally intervened to move groups into subgroups, in exchange for appropriate remuneration. Since you're talking about establishing an Enterprise group, I suspect that would provide sufficient motivation for him to help with this.

Try sending an email to [email protected]?and hopefully you'll get some kind of response. Just understand that if you do make this change and decide you don't like it, he's unlikely to help you change it back.

Good luck,
Bruce

---

Check out the groups.io Help Center?and?groups.io Owners Manual

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Brendan,

Thinking out loud but having & sharing a large percentage of the userbase amongst the groups is just one factor, there are other factors & considerations (and potential headaches) as well, some possibly on your end.? With the large number of groups you manage (I don't envy you BTW! :), and not knowing the type/variety of groups you have, it may end up being more of a headache managing your groupset as subgroups vs individual groups, I don't know.? You'd still have to manage the same number of groups but now you'd also have to worry about making sure any settings/changes/whatever are not possibly conflicting or causing unintended results on the rest of the groupset.

Then there would be the planning part also, for example, how would my current (main) group now may possibly have to change to accommodate all the types+functionality+setup+needs of the subgroups?? There may be some change you may have to do to the main group that you don't want or really like, for example a new subgroup user may or may not like the main group's function, so you could possibly set the default main group subscription to NoEmail to be on the safe side, but on the other hand you want the default on the main group to be something else because that other setting works perfect for it.

You'd have to go to each group and edit all static URL/link references in notices, wiki, etc to the new links.? Possibly also adjust any other group setting which you've added a link like on footers.? Forget about changing links within the message archive, too much work, they will now be broken.? Maybe Mark's "move" process accounts for all this and changes the links for you since the move is really only taking place in the database pretty-much, I have no idea.? Regardless of that, you'd also have to manually edit any links to the groups outside of GIO.? And if you currently have guideline-rules documents/pages setup on your groups, you'd now have to edit all of them to add info on how to manage their main group membership besides the (sub)group membership.?

Cheers,
Christos

On Wed, May 4, 2022 at 01:59 PM, Brendan Quinn wrote:

When I moved our organisation's lists over from Yahoo! Groups a few years ago, I created everything as separate groups, so we now have 26 different groups in groups.io.

The groups all have slightly different memberships, but there is a lot of crossover. We have some groups that are public (can be joined with no approval) and some that need approval (we check that you're a member of our organisation before letting you in)

It sounds like it might be a good idea to have one main group and then make all of our discussion groups subgroups. (It sounds like that's how I should have done it in the first place.)

We had disparate Yahoo groups and brought everything under one roof with a single Groups.io group. Under that, we have around 20 subgroups for things like members in different geographical areas, different interest groups, team leaders, Moderators and the Committee etc.? Our group has restricted membership and when someone joins our club, we Direct Add them to the main group (which we called 'allmembers' from the outset as that's what it contains) and add them to a local area subgroup. Members are free to join whichever local area subgroups they wish but membership of other subgroups requires approval.

Why? For one thing, we're considering using Auth0 for single sign-on authentication (under their non-profit plan) and it seems that groups.io would require each group to be on the Enterprise plan to get the integration. That would add up to a LOT of money for our very small organisation.

If you can do without SSO,and avoid the need for an Enterprise plan then it would save you quite a bit of money.? As Bruce pointed out though, establishing an Enterprise group, at least to start with, may encourage Mark to assist with merging your existing groups, into one plus some subgroups. I guess you could always downgrade at a later stage.

Also it seems that administration might be easier, for me and for our members.

We have found the Admin relatively easy to handle.? Myself and my fellow co-owner moderate messages as needed across all subgroups. On our main (allmembers) group, it's fully moderated. On the subgroups, it's just the first message in a new topic. We have members defined as Moderators on our subgroups but that was primarily to give some level of control over details being added to calendars and access to the membership list for each one.? There's an ongoing topic on Beta just now about more granular member permissions and if there is movement in that direction, we will review our approach.

From our club point of view, it was always a challenge to get messages to all members when they used different Yahoo groups. Now, with everyone on the same group, it is easy to issue club-wide notices to allmembers. We disabled the 'no email' subscription option to ensure we could send them a 'special message' and limit these to a couple per month. From our members' point of view, some were used to having different email addresses for different Yahoo groups so they had to change and get used to having one address. That didn't take long though and the consensus of the Committee and membership as a whole is that the move to Groups.io has been a big success.
?
Regards
Andy

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I've been doing exactly the same thing for a non-profit I am associated with. If you have a single premium account and are the owner of the old groups, the procedure for each group is as follows:

1. Create a new subgroup of the premium group. Set permissions appropriately for the subgroup. Each subgroup can have different settings than the main group or other subgroups.

2. Download a CSV file listing the members of the old group. Go back to the old group. Click Admin->Members->Download. This will create a file named something like members-list.csv in your Downloads folder.

3. Edit the file to conform to the format accepted by the groups.io "Direct Ad" feature. Delete the first line, the title line. Change each of the rest of the lines to the format Name <e-mail Address>". For example, "John Doe <john.doe@...>".

4. Use the new file to add the members of the old group to the new sub group. Go back to the *main* group. Click Admin->Direct Add. Check the box to add? the members to the new subgroup. Fill in the box for a file to upload with the edited member file you created in step 3.

I wrote a bash script to do the conversion from the export format to the import format. If you want that (again, it's a bash script), send me an email. I also submitted a feature suggestion on the groups.io developers list that said the Direct Add feature should accept the same format as the Download feature.

Thanks everyone, there are some really useful responses here.

@SMax, thanks for your guidelines but it seems that the approach you describe would only migrate the membership list. We have 10 years of history of some of these groups (going back to when they were on Yahoo! Groups) so we would really like to migrate the archives as well. If we can't do that, then we would prefer to stick with the status quo.

Luckily we haven't really used calendars, wikis etc so we don't have to worry too much about broken links.

I'll contact support and see what they recommend.

Thanks again, everyone!

Brendan.