Group Summaries

Switch on on-demand AI summaries of long discussion threads, and set how long a thread has to be before members are offered one.

The Group Summaries page describes itself in one line: "Configure on-demand AI summaries of group post threads." What it configures is what the page calls a Summarize button on long post threads.

There are two settings, and between them they decide two things: whether that button is offered on your site at all, and how long a thread has to be before it appears. Nothing else about the feature is configured here.

Opening the Page

In admin mode, go to Admin → COMMUNICATION → Group Summaries. It sits directly after Groups in the menu, which is a fair description of the relationship — this page tunes one feature of discussion groups rather than standing on its own.

The page holds one card, AI Summaries, with the two settings below it and a Save button. Save is greyed out until you change something, so opening the page to look costs you nothing.

Enable Summaries

Enable summaries is the switch that turns the feature on. Its help text is worth reading in full, because it describes the whole feature in three sentences: "Show a 'Summarize' button on long post threads. Members generate a summary on demand; it is cached and refreshed when the thread changes. Requires AI to be configured."

Three things in there are worth drawing out:

On demand. Nothing is summarized until a member asks for it. Turning the switch on does not start summarizing your archive; it puts a button in front of members and waits.
Cached, and refreshed when the thread changes. Once a summary of a thread has been generated it is stored rather than regenerated for the next member who asks — and when the thread moves on, the stored summary is refreshed rather than left stale.
Requires AI to be configured. The switch on its own is not enough — see AI Has to Be Configured below.

With the switch off, members are never offered a summary of anything. There is no partial state and no per-group exception.

Minimum Thread Length

Minimum thread length (words) is a number field, and it ships at 400. Its help text explains both the mechanic and the reasoning: "The Summarize button only appears once a post and its comments reach this many words. Below it, reading the thread is faster than a summary. Default is 400."

Two details in that: the count is of the post and its comments together, not the post alone — so a short opening post with a long argument under it can cross the line. And the number is a judgement about when a summary is worth having at all, which is why the help text bothers to explain itself.

Choosing a number

Start at the default and change it only in response to something you observe:

Raise it if members are summarizing threads they could have read in a minute. The button appearing on a thread that does not need it trains people to ignore it.
Lower it if your groups run to genuinely substantial threads that never cross the line — a discussion of thirty terse comments can be hard work to read and still fall short of 400 words.

The threshold is one number for the whole site, so set it for the way your busiest groups actually write. If one group's threads are all long and another's are all short, the number will be generous for one of them.

AI Has to Be Configured

The switch's own help text ends with "Requires AI to be configured", and that is a separate piece of setup from this page. Nothing in the admin menu configures AI — there is no AI page in it — so this is not a second switch you have missed.

Important

Because the two are separate, Enable summaries being on does not by itself prove members will see the button. If you turn it on, set a sensible threshold, and members still report nothing on a long thread, AI configuration is the thing to check before you go looking at the threshold again.

What Is Not on This Page

The card has one switch and one number, and that is the whole page. In particular, there is no:

Per-group control. You cannot enable summaries for the announcements board and withhold them from a committee group. The setting is site-wide.
Per-member-type control. Unlike most of what you configure in fellos, there is no member-type column here — this is not an access level you hand to some types and withhold from others.
List of summaries. Nothing here shows which threads have been summarized, or lets you read, clear, or pre-generate a summary.

The other AI feature in discussion groups — Ask AI, a question box over your group archive — likewise has no page in the admin menu. This switch is described only in terms of the Summarize button.

What Members See

The member-facing side is documented in the Member Guide, at Ask AI & Summaries. Point members there rather than explaining it yourself; it is written to the same two conditions you set on this page.

If a member can't see the Summarize button

There are three reasons, and all three are normal: summaries are switched off for the site, AI is not configured for it, or that thread has not reached the minimum word count. Check them in that order — the first two are yours to fix, the third is the setting working as intended.

One thing worth knowing before you announce the feature: asking a question or generating a summary means sending the group content involved to the AI provider fellos contracts with. Security & data handling on the main fellos site sets out what is sent and what stays in fellos, and is the right thing to read before you turn this on for an organization that will ask. Members' use of Ask AI is also written to the audit log, under the action Ai_generate against an Ai Usage entity, with the member's name and the time.