Social Groups

[felix]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

If fans would like to create a safe-haven, they may use the Social Groups feature of this website.

Originally Posted by Klashikari

Even social groups can be used for that.

As part of the Animesuki ChoiceAwards we've had a Social Group setup for discussing various issue. The conclusion after a year of trying to use it? Social Groups are the last place on this forum you would ever want to discuss things! It's essentially easier to send someone a text file with the message then it is to send the massage with social groups.

The social group subscribtion and social group discussion subscribtion feature is nearly invisible in your profile; it's basically bellow even Forum subscribtions and you have to be looking really hard to find it or find if it's updated.

But lets say you have no problem of updates since you check it every day manually or something absolutely crazy like that.

How usable is a social group for discussing things?

Problems

1. You can't quote nobody. To quote your best bet is to color your text maybe italics, probably try some funny symbols.
   
   
2. Wanna post a list? Well too bad. Minus sign is all you got. If you got a list with a sublist in it, text file and megaupload.
   
   
3. Got more then 2 paragraphs? You have to create another post. And then another. And then another. The entire system was basically designed for people that write 1-line.
   
   
4. Bolding, headers? too sophisticated.
   
   
5. Thread reaches page 2, well good luck in people seing page 2. There are no pages on the actual group page, and clicking the topic will always lead to the top of page one. There is a pagination but it's all at the very bottom of the page and you have to know to look for it.

Those are just the main issues.

At the moment we rely on purely private messages. It's awkward but not nearly as awkward as social groups and at the very least, it works.

My issue with what you said though is that in the past when the problems with using social groups was brouth up you've said social groups are NOT for discussion and so on and that's why they are intentionally horrible (and why you've intentionally set them to be horrible and unusable). And yet now you come and say they are the alternative to having a discussion. Really? They most definetly still aren't even remotely usable for even a few people discussing things! The only thing you can do with them is post images and maybe 1-liners; not discussing anything.

So which is it?

[totoum]

While I wasn't in favour of felix's proposal I second all of what he just said here.

Using social groups as a "safe heaven" for fans sounds like a great idea....if the social groups were somehow more usable.

[Skyfall]

Originally Posted by totoum

While I wasn't in favour of felix's proposal I second all of what he just said here.

Using social groups as a "safe heaven" for fans sounds like a great idea....if the social groups were somehow more usable.

While there certainly is some merit in discussing the functionality and usability of the Social Groups (even though there are some that seem to manage just fine), please realize that providing "safe havens for fans" simply isn't what we are set out to do, which is the reason the previous threads about the specific issue were shut down, and why that really shouldn't be brought up as an argument here - it isn't one of major relevance for us and won't really go anywhere.

Yes, there are areas where the Social Groups can be seen as inferior to the forum proper, but then again the forum proper is the main attraction, with social groups being the side dish. That is not to say we are out to deliberately cripple or inconvenience people who wish to use them, but neither do we want them to become a full replacement for the main discussion threads, thus it stands to reason they wouldn't garner our prime attention.

What we do present them as, is an alternative for some off-the-thread discussion, and evidently there are people who have made it work, but they are not meant as a point-for-point replacement for the main discussion threads themselves.

[Flower]

Originally Posted by Skyfall

...Yes, there are areas where the Social Groups can be seen as inferior to the forum proper, but then again the forum proper is the main attraction, with social groups being the side dish.

That is not to say we are out to deliberately cripple or inconvenience people who wish to use them, but neither do we want them to become a full replacement for the main discussion threads, thus it stands to reason they wouldn't garner our prime attention.

What we do present them as, is an alternative for some off-the-thread discussion, and evidently there are people who have made it work, but they are not meant as a point-for-point replacement for the main discussion threads themselves.

Yeah - how Skyfall presented it are kinda my feelings on Social Groups.

In my own experience (which is albeit a limited one in this area) for Social Groups to really "work" it takes a handful of very dedicated members to keep the ball rolling therein.

[totoum]

Originally Posted by Skyfall

While there certainly is some merit in discussing the functionality and usability of the Social Groups (even though there are some that seem to manage just fine), please realize that providing "safe havens for fans" simply isn't what we are set out to do

There are always people that "manage just fine" if that was a viable argument against change then nothing would ever happen.
So what the moderating staff means when they say "If fans would like to create a safe-haven, they may use the Social Groups feature of this website." is that hosting such a pace isn't the forum's priority and it should be relegated to the "side dish" that are social groups?

That is not to say we are out to deliberately cripple or inconvenience people who wish to use them, but neither do we want them to become a full replacement for the main discussion threads

Sorry to sound a bit hard but you might not want to say that you are out to deliberately cripple or inconvenience people who wish to use them but that is what you are doing by not having features like being able to quote someone.

I'm not even interested in such "safe heavens" myself.I just feel like a statement such as the one I quoted is quite a contradiction.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by felix

My issue with what you said though is that in the past when the problems with using social groups was brouth up you've said social groups are NOT for discussion and so on and that's why they are intentionally horrible (and why you've intentionally set them to be horrible and unusable).

Nobody ever set Social Groups to be "horrible and unusable". I checked against another vBulletin forum I manage and these are basically the default options. They're this way because I doubt anyone ever thought about changing them. So rather than going on this big accusatory tirade, don't you think you could have just asked for us to change some settings?

I've changed the options to enable quote, list, and a bunch of other BB code options now. I've also increased the post size to match what we normally use for posts. I don't know that we can do anything easily about the placement of the "next page" links, but we can see how that looks once we migrate to vBulletin 4 and if further changes are needed at that point. I looked through the remaining options and they seem to make sense, but if there's something that is needed to make Social Groups more usable, we're all for it -- with the disclaimer, as Skyfall mentioned, that the forums proper will always be our primary focus.

Originally Posted by totoum

There are always people that "manage just fine" if that was a viable argument against change then nothing would ever happen.
So what the moderating staff means when they say "If fans would like to create a safe-haven, they may use the Social Groups feature of this website." is that hosting such a pace isn't the forum's priority and it should be relegated to the "side dish" that are social groups?

That is more or less correct. We will not implement a forum-wide initiative that officially serves this purpose. If fans of a show would like to create a separate area that is not properly served by the current forum structure, Social Groups are an option. We can make some changes to Social Group options (as mentioned and already made), but to a certain point it is what it is (as implemented by the vBulletin team). If that's still not good enough, then the other option would be for people to go to another website (or make their own) to meet that need. At the end of the day, we won't be all things to all people.

[Flower]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

...I've changed the options to enable quote, list, and a bunch of other BB code options now. I've also increased the post size to match what we normally use for posts.

I don't know that we can do anything easily about the placement of the "next page" links, but we can see how that looks once we migrate to vBulletin 4 and if further changes are needed at that point.

I looked through the remaining options and they seem to make sense, but if there's something that is needed to make Social Groups more usable, we're all for it -- with the disclaimer, as Skyfall mentioned, that the forums proper will always be our primary focus.

Oh?

Thank you very much for this!

[felix]

relentlessflame, Thank You very much.

[Triple_R]

My thanks to Relentlessflame as well.

Much of my issue with Social Groups were the exact same as the one's specified by felix on this thread: I just found that they had a very unfriendly format even for a subsection of an internet community. With good functionality changes to that format, Social Groups will hopefully provide just the sort of thing that I think felix and I would like for them to provide.

[Haak]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

I've changed the options to enable quote, list, and a bunch of other BB code options now.

For some reason I still can't quote anything in my Social Group.

[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by Haak

For some reason I still can't quote anything in my Social Group.

I don't think there's a quote button next to posts, but you can use the quote tag in the text of your comment, like [quote]whatever[/quote]. So you can indicate that you're quoting a previous post/poster without having to come up with some other way of doing it.

[Kimidori]

[ QUOTE=Username]things[/QUOTE] (without the space) will show who you are quoting.
for example

Originally Posted by Someone

what he/she said

[DezoPenguin]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

I've changed the options to enable quote, list, and a bunch of other BB code options now. I've also increased the post size to match what we normally use for posts. I don't know that we can do anything easily about the placement of the "next page" links, but we can see how that looks once we migrate to vBulletin 4 and if further changes are needed at that point. I looked through the remaining options and they seem to make sense, but if there's something that is needed to make Social Groups more usable, we're all for it -- with the disclaimer, as Skyfall mentioned, that the forums proper will always be our primary focus.

I didn't even realize until today that this change had been implemented (specifically, in the size of the post length allowed). Thank you very much; it makes things much easier to use the group!

[zzhk]

I hope it's not wrong to necro this thread, but apparently there is a bug with the member listing of social groups.

Case in point:
http://forums.animesuki.com/group.ph...rs&groupid=765
Only the first page comes up, without any page navigation.

Since it only appears to affect one group, one might suspect the sheer number of members might be the cause.

[chad001]

While we're still necro-ing, at least 3 different people have been reporting problems joining, or being kicked out of the, the Oda Nobuna social group...