Ability to hide private groups

[Marc]

If there is already a way to do this I would love to know how, but from what I can see there is no ability to create a hidden group. Private groups are great, but almost every other platform I briefly looked at before deciding to spend more time developing my new network on Ning has three settings for groups - public, private and hidden.

If all the other platforms have this feature there must be a reasonable number of people that want it. I, for example, want to create a hidden group for the management committee of my network, but I'm sure there are plenty of reasons to want this.

Does anyone else think this is a significant gap in the current Ning offer? Can anyone from Ning tell us whether this is a planned feature, or whether there is a reason why they don't want us to have hidden groups which I may not have considered?

[Rob]

Is there really no way to hide a group? I disagree with the last comment, the somewhat clumsy in-system email does not lend itself to multi-person admin discussions. The private group works fine but when it routinely floats to the top of the groups as one of the most active, members do notice and feel like they're being left out.

[Shannon @ SyfrSpace]

Add my name to the list of those who want this feature. Because we can't set up sub-groups, I decided to use a workaround and set up 9 groups for book chapters that are linked from another group that is the main book. The idea is that people will need to be approved for the main book group, then all of the rest are free to join without approval. BLAH - now all of the 9 chapters show up under the group list, which entirely defeats what I was trying to accomplish. I want to hide them from the group list and only allow access to them once someone has joined the main group.

[Shannon @ SyfrSpace]

I now what to hide those 9 groups totally because we want them to be temporarily inactive and need them again later. I don't want to set them up again when it is time to use them, but it seems that my only option at this point is to copy the html to a document and delete the groups. When we want them back, I will have to recreate them all. It's kind of a pain for something that should/could be done with the click of a radio button.

[Roben-Marie Smith]

I would love to see the "hidden" feature option.  I offer workshops on my NING site and I would like to get my group all set-up and "launch" it when I am ready.  For now, the group icon shows and I would prefer it to remain unseen until I am ready to open the workshop/group for members.  I see it like working on a blog post in draft and then making it visible when I am ready to post it. :)