CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Parent groups should be lockable so that users can not be added to the group. Locked groups would not show up when editing user records, but would show in the group drop down on the Find Contacts page.

The system allows hierarchical groups. Administrators should be able to a parent group be an empty container for other groups only, with no users in the parent group.

This would be great for clustering users by class of Event. With separate Profiles (say Seminar - Onsite, and Seminar - Offsite) for different types of events, where each Profile is configured to add new users to a particular group (say a group called Seminar - Onsite), a parent group (Seminar Participants) can "contain" multiple subgroups , each subgroup tied to a profile used for registration of an event type.

Then you can quickly search for all participants of certain event classes by creating a group that corresponds to each profile (event class) and then making those groups have a common parent group. By locking the parent, users editing user records cannot place users into the parent container group, but can search on the parent group to find all participants of all events of the same (logical) event class.