WABetaInfo Announcement group is available on WhatsApp for up to 5000 members

After releasing WhatsApp Communities to even more users on WhatsApp for iOS, Android, and Desktop, we decided to launch an experiment with our visitors by creating an announcement group for WABetainfo within a community on WhatsApp!

As you probably already know, we have a Discord Server where we discuss new features, changes, announcements, bugs, and more, with all other people that joined the server. We have more than 16k members on Discord and we appreciate this platform, but wouldn’t it be amazing to get WhatsApp news right within… WhatsApp? For this reason, we decided to create a community on WhatsApp for WABetaInfo.

WHAT IS A WHATSAPP COMMUNITY?:
A WhatsApp Community is a place where it is possible to organize and bring related groups together with the same topic. Let’s imagine a school with all its classes: the school is the community and its classes are the groups of the community. So a WhatsApp Community is not a group but it is like a catalog of similar groups managed by the community creator.
The concept of a WhatsApp Community is very similar to a Discord Server, even if WhatsApp Communities do not pivot to a public social network model.

THE ISSUE:
We think a community is a perfect place where we can discuss news about WhatsApp for all their different platforms, in the future. But why do we say “in the future” since communities are already available? When you join a group that belongs to the community, all group members would see your phone number at the moment, and we do not want this to happen.

THE SOLUTION:
Our community only contains an “announcement group” where nobody, except the community admin, can see who joined the community. Phone numbers are always hidden in this special group since the participants’ list is not available.
WhatsApp plans to hide phone numbers within groups of communities between group members in the future. When this privacy feature will be enabled, we plan to create some groups within our community and there will be a new article with further details. This is exactly the final solution for the issue above mentioned.

RULES:
There is only one rule if you join our community, at the moment: you don’t have to call and message the community admin privately. The account is only used for managing the community and notifications are disabled. Any private message will get you removed and blocked from the community. You can always reach WABetaInfo on Twitter.

HOW TO JOIN OUR COMMUNITY:
You can join the WABetaInfo community by using this community invite link. We previously released our community invite link to some users and we’re happy to invite everyone today. Note that this invite won’t work if communities are not enabled for your WhatsApp account (this mainly happens for people in Brazil).
By joining our community, you accept our rules and you will be automatically added to the announcement group. Note that we do not know the impact of our community: since more than 16.000 members joined our Discord server and we have a lot of followers on Twitter, it is possible that the announcement group may be full when you try to join. In this case, please try after some time until someone else leaves the community.

When you join a community and only the announcement group, your privacy is preserved since your phone number is only visible to the community admin and is hidden from all other members of the community. If you do not feel comfortable sharing your profile photo, you can also set up an avatar as a profile photo or select at least “My contacts” as privacy settings. As always, messages shared within a community are end-to-end encrypted so only members of the community can see them.

HOW TO LEAVE A GROUP OF THE COMMUNITY:
You can leave the announcement group of the community by opening the group info. You can join it again at any time but it won’t be possible for you to read what has been shared when you weren’t a member of the group.

HOW TO LEAVE OUR COMMUNITY:
You can leave a community at any time by opening the community info page: you can find an “Exit community” action here. When you leave a community, you automatically exit all existing groups you belong to that are part of the community, even the announcement group. You can always join the community later but note that the amount of time you must wait to be re-added by the community admin exponentially increases (until 81 days) every time you leave the community so do not play with this feature if you really want to stay with us. You can always mute the announcement group if you want to take a break.

If you love keeping up to date about WhatsApp news, even thanks to push notifications from the announcement group, you can join our community today. We always appreciate feedback to improve the community so be free to share your opinion with us on Twitter.