May 9th Huddler Update

[iacas]

Social Groups!

This release is largely devoted to a single new feature: Social Groups . Members now have a way to create "clubs" and gather around topics of shared interest. This is a major feature with a number of moving parts -- Groups are very easy to create and maintain, but these notes dive deep into the details.

Basics:

Any member may start a social group. Each group has its own forum and shared image gallery. The group page lists members who've joined and displays a "Join" button to other visitors.

How to Find Groups:

There's a "front door" entry page for Social Groups located at: http://thesandtrap.com/groups (as of May 10th).

This page lists the newly-created and most-popular Groups on your community and lets members navigate by tag. There's also a new tab on the site search results page which shows Social Groups related to your search query.

After you've joined one or more Groups, they'll show up in a box on your profile page. When you tag Groups, they can be promoted as "Related Groups" in relevant areas of the site in the same way that Related Forum Threads and Related Articles now appear in the right column of various pages.

Group Forums:

Social Group forums will not be listed with your site's overall forum listings, but threads within Group forums can appear in the site's activity feed; posts within Social Group forums will appear in your site's All New Posts page.  When a user posts within a Social Groups forum, it counts toward their post count, and that post will be visible on their "All Posts" page.

You'll also find Social Groups forum posts in the "posts" tab of the Mod Queue. We designed Social Group forums to behave similarly to standard forums to promote member discovery and adoption of this new feature. Wherever it appears, the name of the "forum" is the name of the group.

Membership:

All content in all Social Groups is publicly visible , but only group members may contribute content and participate. For example, only "Morning People" members can post in the "Morning People" group forum or upload photos to its gallery.

There are two types of Social Groups:

1. Open membership : anyone may join by clicking the "Join" button.
2. Membership by approval: clicking the join button initiates a PM requesting membership that will be sent to the Group Lead for approval.

Group Leads:

Group Leads are the members in charge; the member who creates a Group is the first Lead, but that person may appoint additional Group Leads.

What can a Group Lead do?

• receive join requests (for membership-by-approval groups) and approve/deny them
• edit the Group description and change the thumbnail image
• ban a member, making it impossible for that member to re-join
• remove images from the shared gallery
• send a PM to all members at once
• promote other members to Group Lead (there can be more than 1 lead in the same Group)
• demote him/herself to a regular Group member

What can't a Group Lead do?

• change the name of the Group
• demote another Lead back to a regular member
• act as a moderator within the Group forum (e.g., delete/edit others' posts and threads, etc.)

Leads can't demote each other, but they may demote themselves.

Moderation of Social Groups:

Site admins and moderators retain full powers in all Social Groups -- mods and admins don't need to be members to post in a Group. Sitewide mods will have all the same moderation powers within Group forums that they have in regular forums.

After a Group is created, no one may change its name; it would be pretty weird if everyone who joined "We Hate Rory Sabbatini" group found themselves members of the "Rory Sabbvatini Rocks!" group.

Q & A:

What about private Groups?

We intend to offer a fully closed and invite-only experience of Social Groups in the future.

Why can anyone create a Group?

If you think about what a Group offers, it's pretty simple: a forum, a gallery, and a member list. Social Groups were created to allow members some freedom to expand upon what's already provided; this feature enables members to express themselves creatively and shape the community to suit their needs.

That's all the release info on Groups; here's another notable feature in next week's release:

Live Stream:

The activity stream already has a subtle way of notifying you when new stream items are available, but you still need to click and refresh the stream to see new content. Every community has active members who watch the stream with hawk-like intensity -- for these power users, we've added a 'play' button!

In play mode, the stream automatically updates with new items as they become available. To balance the load on our servers, we limited how frequently the Live Stream updates; new items will be pulled in every 30 seconds for up to 90 minutes, at which time the stream will pause itself again.