---
title: "Set the organisation-wide defaults for groups"
description: "Choose who may create each kind of group, and set the organisation default for adding members, labels and integrations inside groups, including whether each group manager may override it."
category: communication
section: groups-and-rooms
tags: [admin]
type: Tutorial
lastUpdated: 2026-08-26
locale: en
canonical: https://support.talkspirit.com/en/communication/modifying-default-privileges-for-groups
---

# Set the organisation-wide defaults for groups


**Groups settings** is where you decide who may create groups, and what members are allowed to do inside every group by default. It also decides something less obvious and more useful: **whether a group manager may change any of it for their own group.** If a colleague tells you a permission is missing from their group's settings, this page is almost always the reason.

Groups are served by classic Talkspirit, so this screen lives there rather than in the new Administration area.

## Who can open this page

**Administration → Groups settings**, in classic Talkspirit. Both organisation administrators and groups administrators can reach it.

They do not see the same thing. **Everything on this page except the last three settings is visible only to a full organisation administrator.** A groups administrator opens the same page and sees only **Default groups to new members**, **Source groups** and **Other locked groups**. If a delegated administrator tells you the permission settings are not there, that is expected.

## Choose who may create groups

Three separate questions, one for each kind of group:

- **Who can create open groups?**
- **Who can create private groups?**
- **Who can create secret (private and invisible) groups?**

Each offers the same two answers: **Administrators and groups administrators only**, or **Allow all members**.

Setting them independently is the point. A common arrangement is to let anyone start an open group, and to keep secret groups in the hands of administrators, so that invisible spaces are only ever created deliberately.

Below them sits **Who will be notified for new open groups?**, set to **No one** or **All users**. This one is easy to switch on and regret: it sends a notification to the whole organisation every time anybody creates an open group.

## Set the default for what members may do inside groups

Three permissions have an organisation-wide default here:

| Permission | Shown when |
| --- | --- |
| **Add / delete integrations in groups** | the Newsfeed module is enabled |
| **Add and remove group members** | always |
| **Manage labels in groups** | the Newsfeed module is enabled |

Each one works the same way. Pick who holds the right (**Only group managers**, or **Allow all group members (including guests)**), then decide the more consequential question underneath it.

## The override switch, and why a control goes missing

Under each of those three permissions is a switch: **Allow group managers to overwrite this permission**.

Leave it off and your choice is final everywhere. **The matching control does not appear in any group's own settings at all.** It is not greyed out, it is absent. Turn it on and every group manager gets that control for their group, and may set it differently from your default.

This is worth being deliberate about. Off gives you one consistent rule and no surprises; on gives group managers autonomy and means the organisation-wide setting is only a starting point. Most support questions that begin "why can't I find the setting for…" end here.

Two related permissions are **not** on this page. Pinning comments has its own organisation-wide setting, and the Drive permissions (who may manage files and folders in a group) exist only inside each group's own settings, with no organisation-wide default at all.

## Saving

There is no Save button per section. Change anything and a save bar appears at the bottom of the page; your changes are applied together when you confirm there.

## Next steps

- [Manage all groups as an administrator](/en/administration-security/managing-groups)
- [Configuring default, source, and locked groups](/en/administration-security/configuring-default-source-and-locked-groups)
- [Allowing users to pin comments](/en/administration-security/allowing-users-to-pin-comments)
- [Working with labels](/en/communication/working-with-labels)