Managing a group

Last updated on
24 September 2020

Responsibilities of group managers

For a group organizer (formerly called "admin" or "manager"), the common tasks are:

  • Make sure welcome information is useful and relevant to new and returning members. You can use that to highlight important posts, explain how to use the group (and how not to), etc.
  • Set the tone for the group: everything from the welcome message to starting and responding to discussions in your group helps to set a tone. The organizers, as stewards for group members, help set this tone. See also the Drupal Code of Conduct.
  • Resolve disputes. If disputes should arise, try to resolve them keeping a positive attitude.
  • Create vocabularies for your group.
  • Create and manage separate pages (tabs) in your group.

See also the About page on groups.drupal.org, which has a section on Policies.

Tasks specific to managing particular types of groups

  • Regional groups
    • Promote local meetings
    • Archive notes from group meetings
    • Facilitate members asking for help
    • Route technical questions to the right group or issue queue
  • Topical/working groups
    • Assemble resources using wiki pages (documentation, tutorials, case studies, etc.)
    • Archive notes from group meetings
  • Event planning groups
    • Explain how people can get involved
    • Archive notes from group meetings
  • Project-related (modules, distributions, etc.) groups
    • Update progress or provide roadmaps
    • Explain how people can get involved in contributing

Group manager capabilities

As an organizer of a group, you will see five tabs at the top of the group that are not public:

  • Home - The tab for the group's home page. By default this is simply a reverse-chronological list of posts, with the group description prepended, but it can be replaced with a different page.
  • Edit - Change group metadata: title, description, mission, type, status (open, closed, moderated), language, public/not public ("list in directory")
  • Taxonomy - Add or edit vocabularies that pertain only to this group. Each vocabulary will be shown on the post authoring form. Use categories to organize content within your group. More information about using taxonomies in your group.
  • Broadcast - Send email messages to every member of your group. Use sparingly.
  • Pages - Replace the default home page or add additional pages to your group using a panels system. Examples: Ecuador, Drupalcon Brasil, Drush (note additional page tabs).

Content moderation

You may occasionally find people posting things that do not belong on your group. You can send the following message to the person who posted the content:

Only post into groups where your content is obviously on-topic. If it's off-topic in a group your content will be removed. If it's off-topic in all the groups you posted into it may be re-classified or deleted.

Adding more group organizers

Group organizers play a critical role in the success of groups. When organizers become unavailable, they can also become a bottleneck, preventing growth of a group. To avoid this, groups are encouraged to have multiple organizers. As membership grows, groups should also actively grow the list of organizers. Groups with more than 20 members and only one organizer will see an automatic suggestion to add more organizers.

To add more organizers to your group, click the "$n members" link in the sidebar to go to the members list, then click "List" to switch to list mode. You can then add or remove admin capabilities by clicking the "Admin: Create" and "Admin: Remove" links in the table.

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