Detecting groups: 2–10 friends, one three-word code

A Group on DetectID is two to ten detectorists who detect together regularly, joined by a single memorable three-word code like amber-coin-meadow. You create the group once, share the code with the others, and from then on it just sits there ready — turning up to a Sunday on the permission and finding everyone’s pins already on the same heat map.

Creating a group

Head to /together and tap Create a group. There’s very little to fill in:

1. Group name.Free text — “Sunday Permission Crew”, “The North Norfolk Four”, “Family Detecting”. Visible only to members.
2. Optional description.A note about the permission, the usual meeting time, the WhatsApp number for last-minute changes. Anything you’d normally repeat in texts.
3. Maximum size.Default 10, minimum 2. The upper bound is there to keep Groups feeling intimate — if you want thirty people, you want a Rally.

Hit Create. DetectID generates a three-word code from a curated vocabulary — finds nouns, landscape nouns, soft adjectives — and you land on the group page with the code at the top and a QR code button alongside.

The three-word code — why and how it works

Short alphanumeric codes (the kind we use for Rallies) are great on a printed gate-poster but awful to read aloud over a crackly phone signal. Was that an O or a zero? A 1 or an I? A bored M or a malformed N? A three-word code dodges every one of those problems.

amber-coin-meadowis unambiguous in print, speakable over a bad call, easy to text without typos, and memorable enough that you don’t need to look it up the second time you join the group. The vocabulary is curated to the hobby — you’ll see words like “hammered, bronze, copper, stubble, ploughland, hedge, lane, meadow, thistle, bracken” rather than the random consumer-software dictionary that throws upchair-elephant-noodle.

Codes are case-insensitive on entry. Hyphens are optional. The join page is forgiving of an extra space or two. The underlying check normalises whitespace and case before looking the code up. If a code somehow does collide on creation, we regenerate without telling you — you only ever see a unique phrase.

The QR option

The group page renders a QR alongside the code. Tap it once and your friend can scan it from across the kitchen table at a Sunday breakfast — no “wait, was that meadow or medlar”. The QR resolves to the same join URL (/together/join?code=amber-coin-meadow), prompts magic-link sign-in if they’re not already signed in, and adds them to the group on the redirect back.

What a group sees

Once you’re in a group, the group page shows four things:

• Member list.Everyone in the group with their public username, plan tier badge if they have one (Premium, Rally Captain), and a tiny activity dot showing whether they’re live in the current session.
• Shared heat map.An aggregated map of all group members’ finds, blurred to the most-private precision setting any of them has configured. Useful as a memory of the permission — the productive corners stand out across months.
• Recent shared finds.A reverse-chronological feed of everyone’s recent identifications, with thumbnail, verdict, and date. Tap any to view it on the uploader’s public profile (if they’ve shared it publicly) or just see the pin on the map.
• Group settings.The creator can rename the group, change the max size, archive it. Other members can leave at any time. Nobody can kick anybody out — Groups are a flat structure on purpose.

The shared session in practice

Here’s how a typical Sunday plays out. Three of you arrive at the permission. One of you opens the group page, sees the others have started their live sessions, taps Join the shared session. From that moment, every find any of you uploads via /identifyattaches to the group session automatically — no special tagging, no extra fields. The other members’ finds appear on the shared map in near-real time. When you pack up at four in the afternoon and end your individual session, the group session ticks closed once the last member ends theirs.

Nothing is lost or moved. Each find lives in its uploader’s own collection at /finds, the way it always did. The group feed is a shared view across those individual collections. If you leave the group, your finds stay with you and the group simply stops seeing your new ones.

Five real use cases

The regular detecting pair

You and one mate. Same permission every other Sunday. You already swap photos in a WhatsApp thread; a Group folds that into DetectID where the finds already are. The heat map across twenty Sundays starts to show you which corner of the field is actually the productive one.

The club within a club

A larger club has fifty members but six of you are the ones who actually work the difficult permissions together. A Group for the six of you means the headline stuff stays inside the smaller circle without going through the whole club’s feed.

The family that detects together

Parents and teenagers who turn up at weekends. The Group lets the parents see what the kids have found without making the kids share everything publicly — the group surface is private to members. (Under-13s aren’t supported on DetectID directly; teenagers can run their own accounts.)

Two pals on a monthly permission

You meet on a permission near the M40 once a month. You don’t live near each other, you don’t detect together otherwise. A Group keeps the monthly map fresh in both your memories and gives you a heat map for the field that’s cumulative across years — the kind of pattern that’s invisible across separate, isolated visits.

A travelling detecting trip

Three friends planning a week in Lincolnshire. Spin up a group for the duration, share the heat map across the week, archive it when you get home. Groups don’t have to be permanent — they’re just persistent until someone archives them.

What Groups deliberately don’t do

• No chat.You almost certainly already have a WhatsApp thread for the people in this group. We’re not competing with it. The group page focuses on finds and the map.
• No identification quota pooling.Each member’s identifications come out of their own monthly quota. We don’t implement “shared” quotas because they get awkward when one member is much more active than the others.
• No public group profiles.Groups are deliberately private. There’s no /together/amber-coin-meadow public page. If you want public visibility for a detecting collective, organise as a club — /clubs is the right surface.

Common questions

Can I be in multiple groups?

Yes. Most regulars end up in two or three: the regular Sunday crew, the once-a-month traveller, a family group. The Detect together page lists them all and a coloured dot tells you which ones currently have someone live in a session.

What happens to the group if the creator leaves?

Ownership transfers to the longest-serving remaining member automatically. The code stays the same.

Can I change the three-word code?

Not directly — the code is a stable identifier for the group’s life. If you absolutely need a fresh one (say a member’s phone with the old code was lost in a Norfolk ditch), archive the group and create a new one. Membership and history don’t carry across, so use sparingly.

What if someone outside the group gets hold of the code?

They can attempt to join, but the existing members are notified that someone new has joined and any member can archive the group instantly. The realistic threat model here is low — you’d need to know the exact code, which rotates against rate-limited brute force. In practice, treat the code the way you treat a WhatsApp group invite link.

Where to next

• Detect together: groups, rallies and how to use both — the overview, with a comparison table for Groups vs Rallies.
• Rallies on DetectID: organising an event, joining as an attendee — if your gathering is more than 10 people or has a defined date.
• Using maps and pins on DetectID — the map mechanics that underpin the shared heat map.