The group feature
Some of you might already have gotten wind that this feature will be implemented, but a lot of you will still not know exactly what it entails for our community. The group feature is simply explained a way for you to make your own areas on the website. These groups come in three forms:
- Open groups: Anyone can join these groups and participate in the various discussions.
- Closed groups: These groups are visible to anyone, but you need to apply and be accepted by the group's staff members to join and participate in the discussions.
- Secret groups: These are neither open nor publicly visible and members can join by invite only.
I mentioned that members can participate in discussions inside the groups, but this is far from the only feature they bring to the table. In addition to your own forum, you will also have access to:
- A member wall, which works like a chat between all the group members.
- A staff wall, where the group’s staff members can chat freely without the members seeing it.
- A detailed members tab which comes with various options for finding members within the group.
- An internal calendar for the scheduling of events.
- Your own rules set by the staff that members must agree to adhere by upon joining the group; your own CoC.
- The ability to set a custom logo and banner that will be displayed to the public and your members.
- A wide variety of settings, like the ability to promote your own staff members, exclusion tools for troublemakers and a whole lot more.
Most of these options are highly modular, so you will have the ability to decide which of these features you want to use within your group. If you for example feel like you don’t need the event calendar, you can hide it from your members to avoid clutter.
A lot of work has been put into making this feature a reality, and the primary incentive was to give a part of the website to the users. Inside the closed and secret groups, there will be no hard moderating from our side. If grave misconduct is reported, however, we will take a look, but the offense(s) would have to be serious for us to intervene. Anything visible and/or open to the public; for example your logo, banner, group name, tagline and public content, will still be moderated on the same level as the rest of the website.
How to get started
In order to make the transition for you easier, I have written up a few words to explain how the groups work. I will not be going into great detail, but it should suffice to get you started with your own group. Color-coded highlights will be used in order to explain the various options you have available to you.
Upon clicking the Groups tab at the top navigation bar, this will meet you:
Here you can locate the various categories we have employed on the forums, as well as how many groups reside under each one. If you click these, you will be taken to an overview of all the groups that belong underneath the category.
In this area you will find information about which groups have the most members, and once you become member of a group with threads, recent threads and posts.
These tabs give you the ability to sort groups after various metrics.
This area houses all the groups that exist. You can see the general information about the group, and upon either hovering over the logo or clicking the orange button, get the option to either join or enter the group, depending on their privacy settings.
This button will allow you to create new groups. You will be prompted to enter the groups’ intended category, after which you will be taken to a page where you can set the general properties for the group. Once finished, your group will be created, and you will enter the primary hub for your new area.
Once inside, it should look similar to this:
The primary tabs within the group. This functions as your navigation bar, and will be highly modular depending on your settings. Members will only be able to see the buttons that you want to display, and the settings to set up these can be found by clicking the cog to the right and clicking the Management Tabs Display button. This cog also lets you manage a lot of other options for the groups, and these are definitely worth experimenting with.
This area will contain messages left by the group members. It functions as a live chat between all the group members, and the staff wall shares the same layout and works the same way for staff members only.
Here you will see the various staff members that are online. The ranks we have set up so far are Group Owner, Group Moderator and Bouncer, but we might add more in the future.You can promote members in the members tab of your navigation bar.
Are you still reading?
This was only meant as a quickstart guide for you to get your groups up and running. We really hope that people come up with creative and smart ways to utilize this feature, and we are really proud to have it up and running and in your hands. Please do report bugs and issues you encounter in this thread, because it helps us immensely on our path to finalizing it. You should also leave feedback if there are any additions or changes you would like to see.
Sincerely,
XPOff
Last edited:
