Social Forums

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
How many of you have noticed the Social Groups? Even if you'd noticed, you'd probably have ignored them because they were a bit crap, especially in the discussions department.

Well, no longer! Let me introduce Social Forums!

What's all this about?

Well, instead of the crap in-group discussions that didn't show up in New Posts and weren't threaded and basically seemed to lack all the useful functionality that you'd expect from a fully featured forum, a Social Group can now create and then associate with a forum of its own. Then people just post threads in that forum as per usual and New Posts does its thing just like usual and everyone has a party. :)

Now, these Social Forums aren't visible on the main forum page and, indeed, you'll have to join the appropriate Social Group to read/post to them. But, after that, just post away and keep an eye on New Posts just as you usually do.

A few caveats and other bits of information:

  • A Social Group can only have a Social Forum if it has 5 or more members.
  • The Social Forum is created by the Social Group owner, who then becomes a moderator for that new Social Forum.
  • If anyone can join your Social Group then you'll find that Super Moderators can also keep an eye on your group, just to help out.
  • If your Social Group is invite only then only members can see and post in the associated Social Forum; it's really private.
  • The old Social Group discussions mechanism is now disabled (for being crap) but some vestiges of it remain (such as subscriptions) which you may need to deactivate or occasionally get a permission denied error when following a link to one of them.
  • I don't think this applies to anyone, but if you already have some discussions in your Social Group and you want to create a Social Forum then an Administrator can migrate your discussions into the forum.

In theory, this should mean that small groups should be able to set up their own clans or whatever without Admin intervention, which'd be cool. In practice I imagine there'll need to be a bit more help than that, especially if the group needs more than one moderator (which is possible, but only with Admin help).

Have to see how it works. Have fun playing with it! :cool:
 
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