New feature: Group Types

Feature Proposal
1

Introducing: Group types

Group type will be a property you set on group creation time, my types proposal are:

  • Democratic Group: This is the current group type of Delta Chat, everybody have admin rights over the group, it will be the default group type.
  • Owned Group: This kind of group has an owner(the creator), the owner will be the only with admin rights(ex. can change the name of the group, and add/remove members, etc), the only modification a normal member can do is to leave the group and they can also post in the group, they can’t add/remove other members from the group nor change the name/image of the group. (more complex behaviour like allowing multiple owners may be added) (maybe this is somewhat what the COI folks call “channels”)
  • Blind Group: This kind of group is similar to the Owned Group since the creator of the group is the only who can modify the group state, but this group type is even more restrictive, normal members can not leave the group, they can not post in the group, they don’t see other members of the group, actually they don’t even know they are in the group since they receive messages from the group owner as normal 1x1 chats. The purpose of this groups is to share the same message with several contacts(ex. notifications, or instructions for at-risk group) without starting a noisy group :wink: and without spreading the contact address with others, and therefore respecting their privacy. This kind of group was previously requested here: Broadcast messages (for later version after 1.0 release)
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This is a very nice idea! +1

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Blind Group is a bit like the broadcast functionality in WhatsApp, maybe we can add the word broadcast somewhere in the name or description to help people coming from WA to understand it.

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Hi Schiminieee :slight_smile:
I don’t want to force names with this proposal, what I am proposing is the functionality, I used that names just to name them somehow to talk about it, I am ok with whichever name the developers decide for this.

Also I had never used WhatsApp, didn’t knew that info, thanks for your comment.

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You mean something like this :wink:

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webratte I have updated the post to point to your ‘Broadcast messages’ post in the ‘Blind groups’ section, to keep things tidy :slight_smile:

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I don’t see a way to implement the “Blind Group” type so an alternative could be a “Channel” group type, in the email the “To” header is set to the channel owner and the rest of the channel members are set in BCC, the channel owner is the only one who knows the group members and the only who can write in this group, users can only leave the channel, which will be shown as a channel in delta and shouldn’t let users to send anything, the bottom bar should be hidden

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Me gusta esta idea servirĂ­an para trabajos de negocio y mensages publicitarios y no creo que sea difĂ­cil de realizarlo, seria similar al mensage de difusiĂłn de WhatsApp.

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Looking for similar feature. Any update yet? Or you found any workaround?

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Sounds like mail merge.

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Whyyy hide something when you can answer through mail client? That’s awkward! )

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you could answer to the channel admin but you will never know the real channel member list

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the same way you could reply in a group you left, but delta shouldn’t allow it if isn’t supposed to happen

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Yeah, and that what I call awkward. You have an app that doesn’t allow you to do a thing that neighbor app do easily.

Or do you propose that DC of other participants will block your email from them? It would be ridiculous since people who are in the thread with MUA will continue with it leaving DC users behind.

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Is this still about Blind Groups?, then:

I think there are two things we currently understand under that term lets split it up again:

Broadcast: like in whatsapp broadcast is a virtual chat that automates sending Direct messages to multiple persons.

Blind Group/Channel: like telegram channels, a newsletter nobody can reply to as its not really a group, it’s rather a feed. like you wont answer to a noreply@email.address.

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seems that you don’t get it, how would people “talk and leave you behind” when all they see is an email from you, they don’t see other members because they are sent in BCC header

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Maybe some dumb questions from my side, but if I was a member of a Blind Group/Channel which I am not aware of, how could I send a personal message to the admin of this group? Would I still have the possibility to contact the admin directly, without sending the message to the other members of this group?

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Yeah, don’t like too much of whistles and bells. For me it’s hard to grasp.

I dream of solid email messenger that people doesn’t receive with phrases like: please stop sending me this awful kind of emails.

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OK, but you cannot prevent messages to be sent and delivered to you in a classic mailer either, unless you do something against. You can block the contact such messages are sent from. Or you can create a server rule that denies messages with a certain attribute used to identify a group message in Delta Chat.

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Gerry, you’re totally right, I was just speaking in general.

There are problems like absence of context in messages which
irritates general correspondents as hell, and it feels like it’s
being this way for years. But discussion is going about blind
groups, channels, broadcasting. Of course, it’s nice to have
mail-list and newsletter features in Delta; especially in a
consistent way with these already lives in my mailbox.

But I just feel like it will lead us from a high quality but
limited product that can do few things well and strive for general
public acceptance, to a geek’s toy which can do everything you
want if you’re nerdy enough to use it. That’s why I’m
overreacting a bit. Sorry about that.