User category and Common category in Groups

When I was creating groups, instead of creating the category first via Admin panel, I simply clicked on + button to add category directly. 

But all that category is not showing on the Group Home page. It is empty!

I clicked on Category though sub navigation menu at http://mywebsite.com/m/groups/categories then all that category is showing under User Category and Common Category is empty.

So what is the difference between the User category and Common category?

What to do to show it on Group Homepage??

this is how i have found to make this work - it sucks - i think it is a bug, but not really sure. First - I ended up having to NOT auto approve categories. What this does is shows these unapproved categories in the pending categories list. Then approve these categories. Auto approve does not actually automatically approve them. It just allows them to reuse the same category they created. You will have to manually add the new category to your common list

User Categories - are categories created by user clicking on Folder icon:

Common Categories - are categories created by Admin in

Admin Panel > Settings > Categories Settings

1. Then how to show user category in Group home page. From page builder, I am not able to add that user category there. Only one category is there and that once is a common category.

2. Also, tell me how to change that user category to common category without having to add that same category from Admin panel and again editing all groups one by one and changing them to the newly added category from admin panel. Just tell me direct edit from database.

I require answer to 1 preferably because I want to show both User category and Common category on the Group home page! 

1. You need to create PHP block with code similar to the following:

        bx_import('BxTemplCategoriesModule');
        $aParam = array('type' => 'bx_groups');
        $oCateg = new BxTemplCategoriesModule($aParam, _t('_categ_users'), BX_DOL_URL_ROOT . 'm/boonex/categories');
        return $oCateg->getBlockCode_All($iBlockID, true);

2. To make common directory you need to change owner field to 0 in sys_categories table.

I updated owner field to 0 in sys_categories table. All categories are now showing in Category settings in Admin panel, Also while editing the group it is showing under Categories drop down

But it is not showing on Group home page in Category block... ??

Try add additional record to sys_categories table for the category with fields ID and owner = 0 

I added a new record to the database to sys_categories table, it is showing in Category setting in Admin panel but not showing in Category block on Group home and category page.

Similarly, I added new category through Category setting in Admin panel, it is showing in category setting but not showing in category block on Group home and category page...

Please help!

To make content appear in common category it should look like this:

The issue was being handled by Nathan Paton hence, I was not replying to this post.

He suggested me to create the category again from the start as a system category.

After long research, I found that if a category has to be shown as Common category then there must be two records in the database with a slight difference in owner field.

Owner=0 and Owner=the id of the user creating the category. So it should look like this 

Hence, I reverted the changes made previously. I didn't change anything neither ID nor Owner. I simply added the same categories via Category Manager which created another record in the database with the Owner=0 and they shifted to Common category from User category.

Then I read this thread again and found AlexT has already shown that using the table, I only was not able to get it properly!

Thank you AlexT

i think there should be some changes here - for me - I have set categories auto approve to false (unchecked box in settings). This way - when a user creates a custom category - I can see what it is. Then I add that category - in the site admin section - to the common categories, and also approve the category. there should be an option to clic a box and submit or something that will add a custom category to common categories - cause only common categories show up in the category list.

I disabled user adding categories altogether; a few thousand users adding new categories can become a nightmare; I don't have the time to manually approve them and autoapproval means potential of hundreds to thousands new categories add to the site.  If users needs new categories, they request for them to be added.