canonical: https://jentic.com/apis/groups.io/groups-io

# Groups.io API

Groups.io is a hosted group communication platform used by hobbyist clubs, professional networks, and community projects to run mailing lists with built-in calendars, files, wikis, photos, polls, and chats. The API exposes 25 endpoints covering authentication, group and subgroup discovery, membership listings, topic and message retrieval, archive search, file directory browsing, event lookup, wiki pages, photo albums, polls, hashtags, and group creation. Authentication is bearer-token after a /login call, and most read endpoints support pagination. The result is a single integration surface for any agent or service that needs to read or post into a Groups.io community.

## For AI agents

Read group topics, messages, members, events, files, and polls on Groups.io, search archives, and create groups or send invites.

## Scope

Does not handle SMS, voice calls, or transactional email delivery - use for Groups.io community mailing lists, archives, members, and events only.

## Capabilities

- Authenticate a user session and end it cleanly with /login and /logout
- List topics and messages within a group with pagination and search the full message archive
- Read group settings, subgroups, members, and individual member profiles
- Browse the file directory, wiki pages, photo albums, databases, and chats attached to a group
- Retrieve the activity feed and subscriptions for the authenticated user
- Look up calendar events, polls, and hashtags inside a group
- Create a new group and send invitations to onboard members in one workflow

## Use cases

### Community mailing list bot

Build a bot that summarises new topics, surfaces unanswered questions, and posts digests inside a Groups.io community. The bot polls /gettopics for recent threads, follows up with /gettopic for full message bodies, and uses /searcharchives to deduplicate against historical content. Bearer-token auth via /login keeps the bot running under a dedicated service account scoped to the groups it administers.

Example prompt: Call GET /gettopics for group_id 12345, then summarise the last 10 topics and post a digest to a Slack channel.

### Member directory and CRM sync

Sync a Groups.io member list into a CRM or member-management database so that staff can see who joined, who unsubscribed, and which subgroups each member belongs to. The API exposes /getmembers, /getmember, /getsubgroups, and /getsubscriptions, and returns paginated JSON suitable for incremental sync jobs. This avoids screen-scraping the web UI when a community grows past a manageable size.

Example prompt: Page through GET /getmembers for the parent group, then for each new member call GET /getmember and upsert into the CRM contacts table.

### Event and content discovery

Surface Groups.io calendar events, wiki pages, and file directories in a unified community portal that lives outside Groups.io itself. The API provides /getevents, /getevent, /getwikipages, /getfiledirectory, and /getphotoalbums so a portal can display upcoming meetings, link to shared files, and embed albums without forcing members to log into Groups.io directly. Useful for clubs running a custom WordPress or Notion-based front door.

Example prompt: Fetch GET /getevents for the next 30 days and render an HTML calendar widget on the club website.

### AI agent integration through Jentic

Let a community-management agent interact with Groups.io through Jentic so it can answer member questions, summarise new topics, and trigger invites without raw HTTP code. The agent searches Jentic for the relevant intent, loads the operation schema, and executes calls against groups.io/api/v1. Jentic stores the bearer token returned by /login in its vault so the agent never sees the raw credential.

Example prompt: Through Jentic, search 'list topics in a Groups.io group', load the operation, and execute it for the configured group id.

## Key endpoints

| Method | Path | Description |
| --- | --- | --- |
| POST | `/login` | Authenticate user and obtain a bearer token |
| GET | `/gettopics` | List topics in a group with pagination |
| GET | `/gettopic` | Get messages within a single topic |
| GET | `/searcharchives` | Search archived messages by keyword |
| GET | `/getmembers` | List group members |
| GET | `/getevents` | List calendar events with pagination |
| POST | `/creategroup` | Create a new group |
| POST | `/sendinvites` | Invite members to a group |

## Key resources

- **topics and messages** — Read topics, individual messages, and search archives across a group
- **members and subscriptions** — List group members, retrieve member profiles, and inspect user subscriptions
- **events** — List calendar events and fetch single event details
- **files and wikis** — Browse file directories, wiki pages, photo albums, and databases
- **groups** — Read group settings, list subgroups, create new groups, and send invites
- **polls and hashtags** — Retrieve poll details, list hashtags, and read group permissions

## Why Jentic

- **Setup:** Wiring the Groups.io API by hand means calling /login for a bearer token, holding it against groups.io/api/v1, and managing pagination and retries across topics, members, and archives yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import Groups.io from the API Directory, store the token once, and your agent calls it.
- **Permission scoping:** Groups.io carries the group id as a query parameter rather than in the URL path, so scope it by operations: limit the agent to the operations it needs, such as listing topics or searching the archive, and leave group creation or sending invites out of the allowed set. The agent can then only run the calls you selected.
- **Credential handling:** Your Groups.io token is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
- **Discovery method:** Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'list topics in a group' or 'search the message archive', and Jentic returns the matching Groups.io operation with its input schema, including the required group id, so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the reference docs.

## Related APIs

- **Discord API** — Real-time chat communities with channels, roles, and voice
- **Slack API** — Workplace messaging and collaboration
- **Mailchimp Marketing API** — Marketing email campaigns and audience management

## FAQ

### What authentication does the Groups.io API use?

Groups.io uses bearer-token authentication. Agents call POST /login with credentials to obtain a token, send it on subsequent requests as Authorization: Bearer <token>, and call POST /logout to end the session. Through Jentic the bearer token is stored encrypted in the vault and the agent only ever receives scoped access.

### Can I search the full message archive of a group?

Yes. GET /searcharchives runs a keyword search across archived messages with pagination, while GET /gettopics and GET /gettopic let you walk topic trees and pull individual message bodies. Combined this is enough to build retrieval pipelines or digest bots.

### What are the rate limits on the Groups.io API?

Groups.io does not publish hard rate limits in the spec. They throttle abusive traffic at the platform level, so paginate sensibly, cache where possible, and back off on HTTP 429 responses.

### How do I create a new group through Jentic?

Install Jentic with pip install jentic, search for 'create a Groups.io group', load the matching operation, and execute it with the group name and settings. Jentic resolves the call to POST /creategroup and returns the new group id.

### Can I read events and wiki pages without scraping the website?

Yes. The API exposes GET /getevents, GET /getevent, and GET /getwikipages, so a portal or agent can pull structured event and wiki data directly. This avoids the brittleness of scraping the Groups.io web UI.

### Can I send invites to a new group programmatically?

Yes. POST /creategroup creates the group and POST /sendinvites delivers invitations to a list of email addresses. Both require an authenticated bearer token belonging to a user with the right permissions on the parent organisation.

### Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the Groups.io API?

Yes. Because you run Jentic One yourself, you decide which Groups.io operations the agent may call, and the Groups.io API carries the group id as a query parameter rather than in the path, so you scope access by operation. You can allow read-only calls like GET /gettopics, GET /gettopic, GET /searcharchives, and GET /getmembers while leaving write operations such as POST /creategroup and POST /sendinvites out of the allowed set. Your bearer token stays stored and injected by your own instance at execution time, so the agent can only run the calls you selected and never sees the raw credential.