Issue: Wiki for Groups

Creating new wiki areas is not something that I believe should be automatic whenever a social group is created, in many cases social groups can be created by almost anyone - but you could manage a system where whenever you see a new social group formed worthy of having a wiki area, then you create one.

Once the sub-forum is set up, you can grant the group rights by mapping your Social Groups to User Groups. I'm not sure there is a way to do this in vBulletin by default, or if there is a mod to. It would be pretty easy to come up with one if needed.

That is, when a user joins the particular social group, they are automatically added to the corresponding usergroup that has rights in a particular wiki area.

Please note: While this is possible using modifications, this has been suggested before as a default VaultWiki feature. However, it's a feature that would need to be added to our "Sponsor-a-Feature" page first, and currently there are other more-requested items ahead of it in the queue.

Yes, this could be done. However, in my case, I will have more than 200 different groups (different scientific teams) + 200 universities + 600 laboratories.... and they will be renewed every year... I guess it might be very time consuming to define 1000 different usergroups...
What do you reckon?

And it would be very memory inefficient to define both 1000 usergroups + 1000 sub-forums, which are all loaded into memory on every page load. If this were to be a feature, structurally it would have to be very different from the current design -

Like there was one "Social Map" usergroup for all of them with the permissions shared by all, but there might be another condition that they can only edit pages with a certain Prefix if they are members of the social group. In this case you would need 1000 prefixes in memory -

It would be easiest to create and maintain if the group could only create/edit 1 page, because the page could easily be mapped to the group. But this approach is very limiting.

I think the simplest solution would be that, in a certain 1 sub-forum, any pages created can only be updated by members of the social group that created the page (use a single database query for the lookup). This would be a 1 sub-forum, 1 usergroup solution (the sub-forum would contain pages created by all groups, inter-linkable - unless set as an Island), but would use the least amount of memory.

All what you say is right.. I'm not a developer and have little knowledge in coding.
Basically, I agree with you.
I would be happy to sponsor this feature, as I would really need it quickly for my website before we launch it.
In our case, we wish that when a member creates a group, he can chose or not to automatically embed in the social group. He could also chose if the wiki is public, semi public or completely private.
Concerning the architecture of such a MOD, I don't really know what could be the best solution.
Once again, I would be really pleased to sponsor you for its development!

I have added this thread to the "Sponsor-a-Feature" page. You can access this page via Members > Donate / Sponsor a Feature in our navigation bar.

Whoa ! quite the large scale.
Having a wiki for this many groups to create Wiki Documents could be very powerful.
I was going to suggest you think about Mediawiki but then again, I think these busy people wont take the time to learn Mediawiki (which is much harder to use than vaultwiki).

You might want to start small with "keen groups". See how much the group uses or doesn't use the wiki. Then try other groups. You also should ask everyone about the wiki idea. You could encourage groups to work on their own wiki if they look for new posts in the group, it would be nice to see if there were new wiki edits too, or new pages, or new pages requested to be done !.

Good Luck

Added for the next build. Here's how it works:

1. You create a new Usergroup to be used as a permissions mask. This is used for all social groups and because of the other settings doesn't have to be anything special - basically the whole point is to allow social groups to edit even if you make no other usergroups able to.
2. In Settings > Options > VaultWiki: General Settings > Social Group Mask, select the Usergroup. A bug in vBulletin makes it look like it doesn't save, but just go with it.
3. A new Usergroup permission exists "Can create groups with wiki group pages?"
4. If a user with that permission creates or edits a group, there is an option: "This group has private wiki pages?"
5. A new forum setting exists: "Allow group pages in this wiki forum?" So basically, group pages can be in any forum / namespace that has this set.
6. When a member of one of these groups creates a wiki page, there is a new option - to leave the page public or add it to the group's pages (there is a drop-down of that user's groups). If you want to change this later, it can be changed by group members who have delete permissions.
7. Group pages can only be edited by members of the group (who also have editing permissions) or by moderators and up. They are still visible by non-members.
8. In the protect tab of group pages, there is an option to hide the pages' content from non-members.
9. If a page is hidden in this way, non-members would receive a message that they are trying to read a private page.
10. If you have permissions to edit the group, you can define a page as the group's Start Page from that page's Edit tab.
11. A "Group Pages" section on the group.php page links the group's start page (or a create start page link), and a link to Special:GroupPages.
12. Special:GroupPages lists all Group Pages.
13. The thread list (forumdisplay.php) now has group filters.
14. When deleting a group, there is an option to delete the groups pages, or make the pages public again.

This is a very nice feature. I'll try it out and test this !!!