@quokka that's an interesting take and I never thought about that. However, I think if the group appears in or is searchable by users that are not in the group, that'd be a no go for our users.
I also realize now that my above statement is inaccurate. If a member navigates directly to the URL of a hidden and private group then they are able to view it. As an intermediate measure, I've trained our moderators to pass these links around so that group members can still get to their group pages. And if the person navigating to the user is marked as a group owner, they are able to navigate to the group page.
The only issue that remains for my use case is a user finding hidden/private groups that they are in.
If I get some time, I'll look into the code to see if there's a way to populate these groups into user profiles as a list or visible in the group listings/search for members. And if that's of interest to the community here, I can share it back through PR to NodeBB or whatever is preferable.
@meetdilip: Yes, of course it depends on the different sites. It should be an optional, configurable feature. Since it seems to be not yet implemented in NodeBB, I woud like it to be considered a feature suggestion.
About choosing Discourse or NodeBB, Discourse has already very nice features like this self-moderation. However, for some other points that can be important depending on the site, NodeBB gives more options. For example, Discourse has explicitly discarded pagination as a possible option, therefore infinite scroll must be used in all cases. Also adamantly discarded are hierarchical categories, and only one level of subcategories is allowed in all cases.
On the other hand, NodeBB seems more open to give options for users' suggestions, such as optional pagination, unlimited subcategory levels, flexible theming, etc. So, this project probably will use NodeBB.
