Facebook Group Changes

Do you belong to a Facebook group? Perhaps you’ve seen a post (or two or more) about getting ‘removed’ from the group if you don’t participate? I started seeing these posts yesterday and was concerned, not only about all the genealogy groups I belong to, but also about the family groups I administer.

Since I was unsure what this meant as a group administrator, I did some research. The following articles helped me understand what is happening.

• Is Facebook Removing Inactive Members from Groups
• Facebook Updates Group Invites, Removing Ability to Automatically Add Members

I then turned to Facebook to see if I could figure out how this is affecting the family groups I administer. The first thing I saw when I went to one of those groups was an announcement from Facebook, “Changes to Your Members List.”

Curious as to how this is working with one of my family groups, using my phone, I clicked on the number of members in the group. This took me to an ‘About’ screen with the members at the bottom of the screen.

At the bottom of the screen, there was a ‘SEE ALL’ prompt. When I clicked that, it took me to a full list of the members. One of the tabs across the top is for ‘INVITED’ members.

When I clicked on INVITED, I discovered four people on the list. According to the instructions, I should send them a message re-inviting them to the group. If they don’t accept the invitation, then they will eventually be removed from my list.

Since this is all new to me, I wondered how someone ‘accepts the invitation’. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure this out from my phone. However, it was obvious from my computer. When I clicked on GROUPS on the left side of my home screen, PENDING INVITES appeared at the top of my list of groups. This PENDING INVITE included the option to JOIN or to DECLINE.

For now, I think I have this change in FB groups figured out. Hopefully, FB will continue to allow ‘consumers’ of information from FB groups and not require every member to be a ‘producer’ of content (either thru posting or commenting).