In the Chat panel you can right-click on a listed chat room and assign zero or more Groups to it.

What are the outcomes of this assignation?

Are the folders/files assigned to that group made visible to chat room members? If so, is this only via browsing the users in the room user list or via Search too? Or am I on the wrong path completely?

As I understand it:
A group is the foundation.
A group can be made of 1 or more selected individual users or all users in selected channel(s)
A channel can be made part of a group and this would then include current channel users.

Thanks BugMagnet.

After a bit of testing I now have a better understanding how things work. I'll summarise it here in case it helps others.

A user can create zero or more custom groups via Library > Groups. A group can have zero or more library items (files and folders) associated to it using the ticks and crosses in the group's column of the main library window.

You can associate a group to zero or more chat rooms (right-click on the room > Groups). Once associated the library items associated with this group will be available in search results and your browsable library to all online members of that chat room.

Similarly, you associate zero or more contacts to a group (Contacts > right-click user > Groups). Once assigned to the group they too will have access to the library items associated with this group via search and your browsable library - they wouldn't need to be in the same chat room as you, they'll always have access to these library items for as long as you keep them assigned to the group.

Note, this feature is only useful if the library items associated with this custom group are *not* public - i.e., have a cross in the "Public" column in the library window - otherwise everyone is going to be able to search or browse for them anyway!

Therefore, what this *is* useful for is private files shared with selected contacts (say, your family or friends), or thematic files only of use to members of a thematic chat room, and no doubt a few other use cases.

I think it's a really clever system, it's just a little under-documented at the moment - hence this guide.

If I had a couple of suggestions about the Groups system, they would be:

- There is no way, at least one I can find, to see a list of all contacts assigned to a group. If you had a substantial contact list, with many people assigned to many groups it's management would become difficult.

- Likewise, if you wanted to know which chat rooms had groups assigned to them and which groups were they, that could be a labourious process to audit.

If I've got anything wrong in my summary above I'm happy to be corrected.

excellent review, and I too have asked for
and thanks to your effort we now have a wiki entry to refer too and build upon

https://support.fopnu.com/groups