How to hide groups on VK from everyone and how to view hidden communities

Telegram channel Programmer and business. Every day there are interesting stories about how a programmer builds a business.

Social networks provide the opportunity to communicate, exchange files, and create clubs of interests - groups and communities. They are open or closed. There are no problems with an open club, anyone can view posted posts and leave a comment, but closed ones are a different matter, here only members have access to posts. We will tell you how to view a closed group in VK, and what needs to be done for this.

Instructions: how to hide your subscriptions

For those who are interested in how to hide a group on VK from everyone, the social network has provided such an opportunity. This can be done either from a computer browser or from a phone.

From PC

To hide communities in VK, you need to:

Open settings, the button is located in the upper right corner;

Find “Privacy” - “Who sees the list...”;

Select "Only Me".

Now only the owner of the page has access to information about community subscriptions. You can verify this yourself by going below in the privacy settings. There is a button that begins with the words “to make sure...”, by clicking on it you look at your page from the outside.

If you can hide subscriptions to groups in VK, it’s more difficult with interesting pages. It is impossible to hide them, there is only the option to unsubscribe and monitor them secretly. For convenience, so as not to search every time, you can bookmark it.

This is done like this: go to the page of the community that interests us. We mark the asterisk on the right side, the inscription “Save to bookmarks”.

If bookmarks are not reflected in the menu, then activate them. For this:

"Settings";

In the main ones we look for “Customize display”;

ABOUT.

Now access to information marked in this way will be easy.

From phone

In order to hide the list of groups in VK from a mobile phone, you should follow the same path. Here the actions are identical to those we performed when logging in from a PC:

Double-click on the profile icon.

Go to the privacy category.

There, find the item that is responsible for the secrecy of your groups.

Select the desired option.

What can you do?

So, we cannot view a private profile, as well as individual hidden sections. And hacking a page is 272 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, so we do not consider this method. What can be done? The average user doesn't have many options:

just try to add yourself as a friend or ask to open the desired section. If you do not have any objective reasons to hide your interest in a person, then this option is the simplest and most accessible;
make a fake account with an avatar that may be of interest to your “victim.” In your privacy settings, set the limit on message senders to “Friends only.” Subscribe to a private profile. The “victim” will have no choice - out of curiosity or a desire to communicate with you, she will be forced to add you in order to write a message. At this time you will have a chance to view the profile;
Chat with anyone on your target's friends list. Ask him to show you the "secret materials", but first make sure that your interest in the page owner remains secret. You should not make such requests to gossips and talkers, as well as unfamiliar and suspicious individuals. The main problem with this method is that the list of friends on a private profile is hidden from the eyes of strangers, so you have to do a little digging to find mutual friends.

Hide your subscriptions from someone

You can hide your VK groups from friends, all users of the social network, or you can set up a list of those who can see subscriptions. To do this, go to “Settings” - “Who sees the list of my…”.

We select those who will have access to information:

Just me or just friends;
Certain categories - some friends (select these profiles), some lists of friends (note which ones).

To hide information about subscriptions from someone specific, you need to select “all except” and indicate the accounts of these people.

By the way, in addition, you can hide a person as friends, as well as other individual blocks of the page.

Is it possible to see hidden sections?

But what if the person did not close the page completely, but only hid some sections from you - for example, photographs or audio recordings? Will I be able to view hidden data if I am a friend or subscriber of this user?

Before the 2021 update, you could use a simple trick to replace the user ID in the link. For example, to view hidden audio recordings, you just had to go to your audio page and replace your ID in the address bar with the number of the person you are interested in.

So, to access audio, you had to enter vk.com/audiosХХХХ in the address bar, and vk.com/albumsХХХХ to access photos, where ХХХХ is the ID of the desired user.

Now this method will no longer work - you will simply be thrown out to the “My Music” or “My Photos” page (depending on which section you are trying to access). This also applies to closed profiles - all sections of the page are automatically considered hidden from “non-friends”.

How to hide members of your public

There are no ways to hide group members in VK. The social network did not provide for such an opportunity. There are ways to achieve similar results indirectly. For example:

Close your community or make it private. Those who are not members will not have access to information, including the list of participants;
Remove your creator and administrator data - remove the name from the “contacts” block, publish all entries on behalf of the community, and not on your own.

On the computer

There are several tricks that can allow a person to look at the comments of another user on the VKontakte social network.

If the user is your friend

If the user is on your friends list, then you can see the comments they left as follows:

Open the VKontakte social network on your personal computer. You must have the " News" On the right side of the screen there is a list with different sections of the site. You will need to find the item “ Updates» and click on it with the left mouse button.
You will be redirected to a page with all your friends' updates. To make it easier to find the comments of the right person, you will need to use a special filter. This filter is located on the right side of the screen. You will only have to leave a check mark next to the line “ Comments" If you have other lines marked, then the mark must be unchecked.
Thus, you will see a page with comments that your friends left. Unfortunately, you cannot select a specific user, so you will have to look at his comments along with the statements of your other friends. In addition, this page does not show all comments, but only those that were left recently.

Special link

There is another way through which you can track some comments from a specific user. This is done like this:

You will need to create a special link. The first thing you need to do is copy the link to the page of the user whose comments you want to track. You only need the numbers from his id. That is, if the link has the full form https://vk.com/id14443434 , then you only need to copy the numbers after the word “ id ”.
After this, paste the copied numbers into the link https://vk.com/feed?obj=HERE&q=§ion=mentions . You will need to insert numbers instead of the word “ Here ”. It should look like this: https://vk.com/feed?obj=14443434&q=§ion=mentions .
All you have to do is follow the link. If you did everything correctly, then you will see a page with responses to the comments of the user whose link you copied.

Online service

If the above methods do not suit you, then you can use a special online service that will help you track a person’s comments on VK. To do this, follow these steps:

Follow this link https://vk.city4me.com/. A page for tracking a user should open in front of you. In the upper left part of the screen there is a section “ VK Login", click on it with the left mouse button.
Log in to your account and give all necessary permissions. Then, copy the link of the user of the VKontakte social network whose comments you want to see. After that, paste it into the “ Enter the ID or address of the VK page».
Left-click on the section "Statistics».
A photo of the user you want to monitor should appear in front of you. Enter special numbers, and then left-click on the “ Add ...", where the ellipsis indicates the user's first and last name.
Then, go down the page a little until you see the section "Go to online statistics..." Left-click on this column.
You will be redirected to a new page with information about the selected person’s profile on VK. At the top of the screen there will be a list with various subsections. Find the item " Comments" and click on it with the left mouse button.
After that, go down the page to the section “Settings" You will need to select the scan depth, and also check the box next to “ 2x" Then, click LMB on the line “ Search in groups" or "Search in friends».
You will need to wait until the online service checks all possible options. It is possible that the test will fail. In our case, no comments were found in groups for this user.

How to see other people's hidden subscriptions

There is no way to view hidden VKontakte groups. There are some questionable methods:

The use of third-party scripts and programs, which may lead to someone gaining access to account data. There is also a danger of introducing a virus into your PC;
Analysis of members of a supposed community to which a person may subscribe. That is, we simply look for it among the participants (enter the name in the “search among participants” line), which will lead to a waste of time in most cases. The result will be the same if you somehow try to analyze likes under community posts. True, unless the user thought to hide likes from strangers. Check whether the user puts a “like” on each post. If yes, then most likely he is a participant. Of course, this is a dubious type of research.

Thus, it is almost impossible to see hidden groups in VK, but it is possible to hide your own and calmly follow the news that is interesting. You don’t have to think about what opinion your friends, relatives or acquaintances will have.

How to find suitable VK groups for paid posts?

The standard functionality of VKontakte allows you to find groups that are suitable by topic (very general) or by name. This is not enough. First of all, because the topic is stated arbitrarily, just as the name does not always reflect the essence of the audience. It's simply too short for that.

I won’t dwell on the difficulties of choosing sites: they are known to anyone who has tried to advertise in public sites. Let's move on to solving the problem right away.

Another approach: we start with the user!

To find the sites we need, we just need to remember why this is being done. Our goal is to find groups where there are people receptive to our advertising. Let's then find these suitable people and see what groups they are in .

Of course, we won’t search manually. I bring to your attention the second tool of the SMMup.ru project - Search for groups based on target audience parameters. The tool is located at: https://smmup.ru/target.php

How it works?

The general idea is very simple:

You indicate the main parameters of your target audience
Based on them, a sample of users is prepared
The program collects data about which groups each user belongs to
The information is summarized, and as a result we see which groups are preferred by people who are our potential subscribers or clients.

Ha-ha, you say. Well, as a result, MDK and EP will be the result - what every second person has subscribed to. That's no use!

That's right. Therefore, the fifth point is the most important! – consists in calculating the compliance index .

To understand what this is, you need to remember the basics of marketing theory. The concept of affinity index is well described in Wikipedia. Let me remind you here that this is an indicator of how much better advertising is perceived by the audience of a particular site in relation to the audience as a whole (random people). It might be easier to understand with examples:

You place an advertising post in 2 communities with the same number of subscribers. From one group you get 100 transitions, from the other - 200. So, the affinity index of the second site is twice as large. It's not hard to understand.
What if site X with 5,000 subscribers gave 200 clicks, and site Y with 10,000 gave 100 clicks? Then the affinity index of site Y is four times lower.

So here it is. The probability that a person in our sample is a member of a particular group directly depends on 2 factors: the size of the group and the affinity index of the site for this sample. But we know the number of subscribers of the group! So what's stopping you from calculating the fit index?

I’m turning this brief excursion into theory and moving on to practice. You don't have to delve into all the calculations with the matching index. Now you will see that it works and that's the main thing.