What is group membership ?

Groups are part of the vBulletin software. The adminstrator can create special groups and assign members to those groups. Moreover, permissions, such as forum access, can be give to Groups.

That's why we have a "Moderator" category on the site, only accessible to members of the Moderator group.

Yes, Public Groups can be created, but not by users... only Administrators.

Thanks a lot Mr. Tgreer for the information. Just wanted to ask what is the actual purpose behind groups ? Can users or other people request the admins to create non technical groups?

Thanks again.

I suppose a request could be made, if you have a good enough reason for it. Mainly, groups are there to provide easy administration. It's easier to create a section of the site accessible to a "group", and give permissions and settings to the group, and then make members part of a group, than it is to grant permissions to individual members over and over.

So it means that since you have a silver badge of "Staff Writer" you are member of the staff writer group which is a elite group dealing with Blogs.

In the same way suppose we can have a group "Game Developers" which will be featuring all those interested or have some experience in game development, is it ?

Thanks for responses.

Not necessarily "elite", but yeah, you get the point.

Members of the "Staff Writer" group get 1) a user profile badge, 2) access to the Staff Writer's Forum. As an administrative task, it's easier to assign those rights to a single thing, a group, than it is to assign those rights to X amount of users.

So, any Group formed would have to have something more within the site than just a shared interest. I think simply having a new forum added to the Coffee Shop area for Game Developers would work fine in your example - no need to create a vBulletin "Group".

Thanks -- have got the idea loud and clear. Thanks for your time and effort I appreciate it.

So, any Group formed would have to have something more within the site than just a shared interest.

Well, for the most part.

For example, at CastleCops, you have special badges when ya join certain groups. However, for half the groups, nothing more happens other then the badge in the profile.

My Folding@Home badge: [img]http://www.sultanofmirth.com/avatars/folding25.gif[/img]

:)

Right... the reason to create a Group is if you want the system to do something with the group. A badge, private forum access, etc. It's an system administration "shortcut".

Moderators are a Group because we need to discuss moderation things among ourselves: private forum permission.

Sponsors are a group because they get badges and access to a forum.

And so on.

Game Developers aren't a group because there isn't a system setting tied to being a game developer.

Many forums create publically-joinable usergroups (such as a Game Developers usergroup) that any member can join as a secondary usergroup. Usually the advantage to being in these publically-joinable usergroups is just a cool badge, but it does let people with the same interests easily find each other, as you can search the memberlist by usergroup. It's all up to the specific forum to decide what they want to do with this vBulletin functionality - but it comes down to there being 3 different types of usergroups: Admin-specified usergroups such as moderators, where only admins can add users; Publically-joinable usergroups that users can request acceptance into, and need to be approved by the group leader before they're admitted; Publically-joinable usergroups that anyone can just let themselves into.

For example, we may make the Staff Writers usergroup a publically-joinable usergroup that would allow anyone to request admittance. It would then be up to the group leader, Davey, to accept or reject an application.

So why arent there any other groups other than Staff writers ?

I just suggested ways I've seen other forums use vBulletin groups. We don't really have a need for many usergroups ... aside from the obvious (admin, mod, supermod, regular member, banned member) we have a usergroup for Sponsors, a usergroup for Team Colleagues, and a usergroup for Staff Writers.