Create an option to archive/unarchive Project Groups

Description

There is an ability to archive a project within a group, but there is no ability to archive an entire group with GitLab today.

If a product is mothballed, the operations team would like to archive the GitLab Group (& projects) so that it no longer appears within the GitLab UI like an active product that is under development.

Proposal

Within the Admin Area, add a UI feature for "Archive group" to the "Edit Group" screen in GitLab. When archived, a group will be hidden from the main Group listing (outside of Admin Area) When archived, a group will be visible within the Admin Area only When archived, a group can be unarchived by locating the group within the Admin Area, clicking "Edit Group" and select "unarchive"

Links / references

Found this old request for this feature that appears to have gotten discarded for some reason in 2014: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/7476

@jpsandiego Thanks for the feature proposal You're right, it will have much better visibility here.

@regisF This is an old revived feature proposal if you could take a look?

Added feature proposal in GitLab FOSS label

I don't understand the need of this feature. I think it will bring too much complexity with no real benefits.

I have a Group with 10 projects and I wish to archive the entire Group so that it is no longer visible from the non-Admin area. Is there another way to accomplish hiding the Group and it's projects?

There isn't a way to hide a group at the moment, and I don't think we should have this feature. Perhaps in the future when we'll have more bandwidth.

There is a lot of stuff we would need to do to make this proposal happen. Archiving a group would impact a lot of existing features (forking, adding a new project, search, user management). At the moment, groups are sorted (if my memory serves well) by latest activity, so anyway those groups will end up at the list if they are not used anymore.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'll go with a naming convention change to make this obvious to users - I'll preface with "z_archive_", although I see now there is no option to actually sort groups by name (only by date created/updated), so not too useful.

Cheers

moved from gitlab-foss#22383 (moved)