Understanding the Privacy Settings on Faithlife.com

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You have a lot of control over your Faithlife Group’s privacy settings. Use this guide to get your group’s privacy settings tuned exactly right.

Group privacy levels

When you create a new Faithlife Group, you can choose between three different privacy levels. At any time, group administrators or moderators (more on what those roles entail in a minute) may change the group’s status.

Open—Anyone can find the group. New members can join immediately. Best used for churches or other groups that are open to new members at all times.

Closed—Anyone can find the group. New members must be approved before joining. Best used for small/home/community/connection/cell groups (or whatever else you might call them) that are only open to new members at certain times of the year.

Secret—Only members can find the group. New members must be invited. Best for groups that are not open to new membership like support or addiction-recovery groups. I also recommend that the church leadership team collaborate inside a secret group.

User permissions

Faithlife Groups offer five levels of accessibility that you can adjust to suite your needs.

• Administrators create the group and promote moderators to manage the group details.
• Moderators maintain the group. Moderators must first join as members, and then be promoted by an administrator.
• Members are invited specifically in secret groups, but otherwise anyone can join at this level.
• Followers are interested in the group, but aren’t members. Many groups only allow followers to reply to posts, not create entirely new posts.
• Observers are like followers, except they maintain anonymity. Observer identities are not revealed, even to the group administrator.

You can also disable the lowest two permission levels using check boxes if you don’t expect to use them.

Recommended settings

Notice the vertical black line on each slider. These are the default privacy settings, marked so that you can return to them should you wish. You can, of course, drag the slider left or right to tune the privacy settings to suit your group’s needs and culture. I administrate several Faithlife groups, and here’s how I prefer to set the user permissions:

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