As a group administrator you can accept pending group membership request, remove a user or even blocked a user from the group. This video will demonstrate all of those tasks.

Requesting Group Membership

Users can request membership to groups as long as they are displaying the “Request group membership” link. Let’s have Chelsea join Group #3.

• Login as "Chelsea"
• Click menu item "Group #3 (Public)"
• Under Group Membership
  • click "Request group membership" link
  • Request message: "I want to join the group"
  • (Join)

Now, you'll notice that the "request membership" link has changed to "unsubscribe from group", but “Chelsea” is not listed in the “Group #3 (Public) members” block. This shows that the request has been sent to the group administrator.

We can now switch back to the Administrator account and I'll show you how to manage group membership.

Administering Membership

• Click "Group #3 (Public)" tab
• Click "Group" tab
• Click "People" (this is were you or another group administrator can manage the members of the group)

At the top of the page, you see the Group overview which shows you the group manager, total members and the total content posted in the group. Below that, you can filter the list of the members in the table below according to state or name or state and name. And finally, we can see members that are active, pending and blocked. We can also see the request message that the user entered when they asked to join the group.

Now, we'll change the status of Chelsea’s membership. To do that:

Modifying group membership

• Operations: choose "Modify Membership Status"
• Select the checkbox next to “Chelsea”
• (Execute)
  • State: "Active" (You can choose from Active, Pending or Blocked)
  • (Next)
  • (Confirm)

Now, you see that Chelsea’s state is now “Active”. Back in Safari, we see that Chelsea is listed in the “members” block, and under “Group Membership” the "Unsubscribe from group" link is still active. As a member she can also see the post "Article #8 (private in public group)".

Removing Membership

Back in the Group tab of Group #3, you can also choose to remove a member from the group.

• Operations: choose "Remove from group"
• Select the checkbox next to Chelsea
• (Execute)
• (Confirm)

If we switch back to safari and refresh, we can again see the "Request group membership" link under “Group Membership”.

Let's have her request group membership again.

• Click "Request group membership" link
• (Join)

Blocking Membership

This time, let's block her membership so that she can not re-apply for membership.

• Operations: choose "Modify membership status"
• Select the checkbox next to Chelsea
• (Execute)
  • State: Blocked (this means it will permanently deny membership to the user, and they cannot apply again)
• (Next)
• (Confirm)

We now see that Chelsea’s state is "Blocked", and if we switch back to Safari and refresh the page, we can no longer see the link to "Request group membership" or "Unsubscribe from group". To unblock the user, remove them from the group or modify the membership status to pending or active. I’ll set Chelsea to “Active”.

You may have noticed that Chelsea does not have any way to post an article to the group. In previous versions of OG, we would have needed to allow authenticated users to post articles by granting the site-wide permission “Article: Create new content”. This is no longer the case. With OG 7.x-2.x we can now configure this per-group, or for members of any group. We’ll discuss that in Video 12 - Global OG Group Content Permissions. When we do that, we’ll also utilize the final option in the “Operations” dropdown, “Modify OG user roles”.