Group privacy problem

[crapi]

Ha thanks! damn it i cant see it because of my CSS advanced settings lol another issue to be fixed xD

You are welcome, of course, though I am not sure what it is that you cannot see. Are you saying you cannot view the bug reports? That would be kinda funny in its own way... a bug in the bug reporting system!

[Caninski_Jen]

Ha thanks! damn it i cant see it because of my CSS advanced settings lol another issue to be fixed xD

You are welcome, of course, though I am not sure what it is that you cannot see. Are you saying you cannot view the bug reports? That would be kinda funny in its own way... a bug in the bug reporting system!

Will take a pic later and show it

[Caninski_Jen]

Ha thanks! damn it i cant see it because of my CSS advanced settings lol another issue to be fixed xD

You are welcome, of course, though I am not sure what it is that you cannot see. Are you saying you cannot view the bug reports? That would be kinda funny in its own way... a bug in the bug reporting system!

https://imgur.com/a/KQqqVCw there it is

[Caninski_Jen]

The declaration of group privacy:
Group admins can choose to make their groups public or private. Public: anyone can see who's in the group and what they post. Private: only members can see who's in the group and what they post.

I was not aware that the group functions were stated this way. If so, then from that alone, yes I would agree that it is not a translation issue. However, I did not find such a declaration or description (please direct me to it if you can!), but don't worry - I still get to the same place. When I checked the group options, here is what I found, with some added doodling:


BGA private group settings 2020-05-02 233113.png


Regarding visibility of groups and their activities, I only see an option to hide the group itself - which I take to mean the group won't show up in lists of groups. I don't see anything specifying the visibility of a group's membership or activities, such as member posts. Was there previously another setting specific to visibility of posts? I'm sure that is going to feel like playing semantics, and it is basically a moot point anyway. So while I have to disagree that it actually specifies that "only members can see … what they post" as you said, I completely agree with the intent of what you are saying because it is impractical/illogical to hide only the listing of a group or its membership while publicizing their posts.

I agree that having this "Who can see this group?" option in the settings makes it clear that the problem is not a language issue (as I myself suggested earlier) and shows that the intention was for what most people commenting here expected with the term 'private'. This of course means that it is not working as intended and is therefore a bug (or series of bugs).
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=8264

It can of course still be temporarily fixed by changing the wording/labeling of the settings to match what they actually do (effectively removing the sense of privacy for now), rather than fixing the effects of the settings, since that would probably be a much bigger project.

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On a semi-related and perhaps kooky side thought, this made me wonder about 'modular' privacy and publicity settings for groups, just a stray train of thought...
So, I figure the basic components of a group's visibility flow from general to specific.
First, there is the question of whether [the existence of] the group is visible at all to non-mod/admin nonmembers. If not, then a nonmember should not be able to see anything related to the group, even when doing specific searches.
Whether the group's membership is publicly visible is of course at the next level, pretty straightforward. However the visibility of the group's activities does not need to be a subset of publicly visible membership. Activities could be listed simply without specifying the involved members; a game could be shown anonymized as being played by 'Player 1', 'Player 2', etc. And different activities, such as showing what was played vs. what was posted, could have separate privacy/publicity options.

For an off-the-cuff example, imagine a group where anyone could see that the group existed and could see posts and other activities, but the group's membership was private so a nonmember would not know who was doing or posting anything. A silly but understandable parallel would be comic book superheroes doing whatever they do without revealing who they are in everyday life. There's an obvious risk of abuse in the particular example (much like comic book villains and their disguises), so of course mods and admins would need access, but that can happen with any degree of privacy. Such a group might do things like offer a bunch of training tables for games that are hard to find opportunities to learn. More generally, I imagine such modularity in the settings would create opportunities for interesting game-related uses. Another example could be a league of players that likes to anonymously play games with various goals in mind, such as a BGA version of a flash mob (nonmembers only see their activities, not their planning posts or who they were or anything else, and it's only fun when they do it for the good of others). I realize the details would need to be worked out and there are certainly bigger priorities right now, but it's a fun thought...

I thank you for your honest opinion and your thoughts about it, it was nice to read this. I do agree with the fact that is not a language issue at all.. and ofcourse some things have bigger priorities right now .. but imo this should be change asap

[Joyce_W]

My feed is dominated by comments in a group that I'm not a member of. I see these comments because I'm BGA-friends with someone who is a member of the group, and who's a friendly-but-not-close acquaintance of mine in real life (we're in the same offline game group from before covid-19, and we've played a couple games together at BGA, but it's not a regular thing). I'm considering unfriending this person on BGA because I don't like constantly seeing posts from a group that I don't belong to.

It feels unkind of the site, like it's teasing me with something I can't get away from but also can't really access: "Look at all this fun discussion (that you don't really want to see)-- don't you want to join this group and take part? Oh, wait, you can't! ("You can't view this group: not authorized") But also, you can't switch it off!"

Ugh.

[N_Faker]

In time your feed will be swamped by so much random stuff your will probably not use it anymore.

[aesche]

My feed is dominated by comments in a group that I'm not a member of. I see these comments because I'm BGA-friends with someone who is a member of the group, and who's a friendly-but-not-close acquaintance of mine in real life (we're in the same offline game group from before covid-19, and we've played a couple games together at BGA, but it's not a regular thing). I'm considering unfriending this person on BGA because I don't like constantly seeing posts from a group that I don't belong to.

It feels unkind of the site, like it's teasing me with something I can't get away from but also can't really access: "Look at all this fun discussion (that you don't really want to see)-- don't you want to join this group and take part? Oh, wait, you can't! ("You can't view this group: not authorized") But also, you can't switch it off!"

Ugh.

The problems larger than that. There are other areas where the page mechanisms disencourage to add friends. Because if you do, your chats will be flooded nonstop with „friend x is online now“, „friend y is offline now“. There are several connections i‘d friend if it would mean as much as a facebook-„friend“, but that i dont because i rather dont have my chats spammed with useless notifications.

[Caninski_Jen]

Today is 22th september, 5 months later after this post, sadly no improving

[KongKing123]

Privacy is definitely a huge issue on this site (see also https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=17208).

I hope that once the admins have hired the extra developer they're looking for, they can work on implementing bug report fixes and suggestions.