Group Changes Coming

April 12, 2021

Changes to public groups

Facebook announced late last year that changes are coming to public groups that would allow others who are not members to be able to post and comment. Basically as moderators we will have to approve participants. We actually will have much more control over content using new tools that Facebook has developed. Some of the changes are being rolled out now, and our group was sent a invitation to participate in the new public groups option under their BETA test. I have declined to participate for now. And at this point we will wait until Facebook switches the group over and forces ours to change, then decide at that time the next steps.

Solutions

I have spent a lot of time reading about these changes, and was on a special live video that they invited admins of several groups to participate on. Facebook has sent invitations to group admins allowing some of us to go ahead and switch over to the new public groups. Our group was sent one, but again for now we will keep our group the same.

The goal is to make groups more visible and to encourage more people to join and participate. Sounds good...but we all know more doesn't always mean better. As moderators and admins we will not have to approve members...they can instantly join, but we will have to approve or allow them to participate.

I have already made Admin changes with the new admin tool that Facebook has developed, so when our group does switch over people who try to comment will have to be approved to do so. We have worked really hard to keep the negative comments off of our group, and this might be much more of a headache when people outside of our group want to participate. They will have to answer participation questions and agree to the rules. But several admins of SEVERAL large public groups do not like this change.

Private Groups

Another group I am in that spends a lot of time discussing groups has always encouraged private groups.  We decided as a group that this wouldn't be in the best interest of all of the businesses we are trying to help, but once again it is something to strongly consider.

I have read several post and comments from other group admins frustrated by these changes. A number of them are changing their groups to private. The number one difference if we did that would be people who are not members will not be able to see what we post and you can not share these post or pictures. The last time we discussed this we all agreed that it would be a negative for our local businesses and our community that we want to help. But look at our active members...and look how fast we are growing. Our reach and circulation is pretty big and amazing already.

If these new changes to public groups causes a lot of negativity, drama, and seems to move our group in a direction that we don't want we will switch our group to private. But once it goes private we only have a short window to switch back after that it will be private for good.

How can our members help

If you see a post or a comment that shouldn't be on our group please REPORT the post. One more time...if you see a post or a comment. Report it.

When you report the post, a couple things will happen automatically. We have changed settings so that frequent flyers can just be automatically removed from the group. And our mods and admins will not even have to deal with it. Our admins and mods will review the actions that the admin assist tool takes, but keep in mind your posts and comments can now be removed for a number of preset reasons. Obviously the first time I set it up it blocked almost 20 post from businesses posting menus and such because the FB admin assist tool assumed it was spam or not relevant content. And it is because of the way a lot of places share their specials. You need to type something...

Facebook is committed to growing groups like ours that provide a enormous value to our community. And they want to do that by making our group even more visible and in more places. So this could ultimately make our group even that much better for our local businesses and our community.

I am hopeful that there will be some additional tools added before the switch is made that will allow us to prescreen people who wish to join our group just a bit more or automatically decline request from even a greater selection.

This could be considered just a growing pain.

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David