Smart Groups with visibility set to 'public pages' won't work as expected

[Osvaldo]

When a group's visibility is set to 'public pages', and you have a profile for contacts to edit which groups they want to join or opt out of, the groups the contact is already a member of show their checkbox checked; but if you set smart group's visibility to 'public pages' its checkbox will show unchecked even if the contact is already a member of that smart group. Once the contact manually checks the box and saves, then the smartgroup's checkbox shows up as checked. This creates confusion for contacts because the list of mailing lists they belong to is inaccurate. I've setup a smart group and profile in demo.civicrm.org to test this out: http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/profile/edit?gid=14&reset=1.

[Donald Lobo]

smart groups are dynamic queries and hence the info is not known when the page is displayed. Recent versions use a cache which make it accurate most of the time (or so we hope), but those changes have not percolated to the profile pages

in general smart groups should not be exposed on profile pages and should just be query based (IMO)

lobo

[Upperholme]

Presumably if a user checks a checkbox to join a smart group then their membership of that group is not smart, i.e. it is not defined by the search criteria which define the smart group. Which sort of weakens the whole premise of having a smart group in the first place.

My advice - keep smart groups for admin use and don't let users near.