Openfire supports 'contact list sharing'. With this feature, all members of a shared group can be made part of the contact list of a defined group of people. To which people this applies can be configured for each shared group:
no-one
members of the group itself
members of one or more other groups
everyone
There currently is a bug in Openfire, that affect the latter two scenario's. The contact list information is not correct in some cases.
This appears to be a cache-related issue, as:
the problem is not 100% reproducible
clearing of caches appears to alleviate the problem.
I'm also seeing this issue in 4.1.1 - I am able to temporarily resolve it by going to Edit Group -> Contact List (Roster) Sharing, and then selecting 'All Users' - saving - then going back and selecting 'The following groups:' ... putting it back to how it was.
This seems to force a client update and the groups show up.
Maybe the issue originated from the older change in 3.8.0 but it was intensified by some other change in 4.1.0. I think applying this fix and letting affecting users try it out is better than nothing.
Katelyn, the fix has been applied. You can try the nightly build from here (don't know your platform so can't give a better link) https://bamboo.igniterealtime.org/browse/OPENFIRE
Thanks. I'm seeing what we can do to test this.
Going to mark as resolved, hopefully folks test 4.1.2 and report back if the issue remains. Will be releasing 4.1.2 shortly.