Editing the tags of topics in Google Groups

Editing the tags of topics in Google Groups

Today's a short post on something I took some time to figure out. At Spacemetric, we're using Google Groups to handle projects.

The system is quite efficient:

  • Subscribe to a group to receive future notifications.
  • Give an email address hooked up to the Group to your customer
  • Boum, enjoy the easy to set up support line.

To be honest, I find the system quite efficient :

  • Mails do not get lost, since they're centralized
  • If you start working on an ongoing project, you simply gotta read the group's topic to know everything needed.
  • If you want to let colleagues know about something interesting, just mail the group.

Said simply Google Groups is for us quite a cool way to retain information that usually gets lost, or spread over several heads.

One thing was really annoying me though, the tags feature. When a user creates a post, it is possible for him to assign tags to it. Quite cool to sort the info. Yeah, but by default the only person able to modify tags is the creator of the topic.
Even the owner of the group cannot modify tags.

Being responsible for the project, I obviously want to be able to sort the topics efficiently . . . without sending tons of mails to my colleagues asking me to change their tags.

It took me a while going through the options before reaching the desired effect.
So if you are the owner of a Google Group and you want to let people change topics tags :

  • Go to the Group page => Manage => Permissions => Moderation Permissions
  • Then, activate the Change Any Tag or Category option

There you go.
As silly as the problem was, It took me a while to find the option.
Partly because the manage link is not super obvious (Thank you, super minimalist design).

Hope this helps.
Cheers,