I never really post much, but that is rather stupid. Indeed it screws up all art and cw community as well as anyone who wishes to be pinged by as many groups as they are part of for any other reasons. Way to go subeta. Always making it worse. That is why so many people are leaving. Revamps here always make it harder for us to do anything onsite, when it should actually be the other way around.

aha! Wish there was a good explanation how it's supposed to work out there... still sounds bad though. 5 open threads... yay.

I wrote half a page of text and I still see people come up with more reasonable arguments against this shit that I agree to. So many arguments against it. Seriously, all of this is such a bad idea.

-typing this from phone so idk if it'll even work because what are forums on mobile-

@ reaper

ikr. Either that "lifting" was so temporary that I didn't even see it, or something went very wrong there and I dont even think Keith has been online in the last few days to address it. Even if they do lift it to 100 groups for everyone... I'm in almost 250 groups, dont think I can narrow it so much. I have no idea how kvc is going to be after this, not really looking forward to tell Kel I cant ping the customers anymore, lol ._.

Ah yeah, the group sidebar thing... its a glitch, Scarsdale looked into it some other day but I think he couldnt figure it out then, basically topics with "groups" on the title get the pings erroneously put in the actual groups pings area (which is where you get alerts for disbanded groups, etc). Dont we all wish bugs were at least ironed out before we got new things pushed?!

@ five

Lol, yes. The thing is, last I knew, the new groups were still in beta test. Many of the features arent ready yet, like shared wardrobe items and banks, so it should have remained in beta for longer. Tbh if it wasnt for this topic I wouldnt even know they were pushed live and its like ??? everyone who didnt have the time to check out the beta literally has no idea whats going on. Much less that this would come with such huge restrictions to us -_-

(regular pings are supposed to work on cult!group threads but again I wont be surprised if it all crashes and turns public or gets deleted or nothing works anymore. this was very early beta still ._. )

[edit] for formatting reasons as this got super ugly when I posted from mobile

your post doesn't have any line breaks and has weird letters instead but aside from that it's ok :D Yeah, I seriously didn't even know there were any changes about forum groups until I saw the topic and then I tested and tried to join a group and ta-dah - "you can't join more than 15 groups" wtf. And then the thing about that they're supposed to merge with cults - I haven't found an explanation yet that goes about the details? How is it supposed to work, what functionalities are we supposed to get, will we be able to ping a group of people that we're not in a cult with, all these things are things I want to know and hundreds more, but no answers. Meh.

How about instead of limiting the amount of groups people can join you instead just get rid of (for now anyway) the new extra special features that have been added? Do we really need group-only shared items, I mean really? Wouldn't it be a MASSIVE strain on the server to have to check all the items then all the users then put two and two together to go "Ohh you can wear this Kumos Shirt now cause you are in this Group!"? And animated gif logos? Where would that even be seen ever? The bank? Why is this needed for ping groups?

Those are all fantastic ideas to have for cults! If cults worked I would probably join one! But they are not features that are needed (or as far as I know ever even asked for) but the users in our ping groups. Let us have our unlimited groups and just work on cults if you want all these sharing features.

looks like everytime I hit enter it gets turned into 'n's... lol so good for mobile users -.- (will try without enters this time) The whole cult!groups thing hasnt been spelled out like that, but implied several times when staff said there were two features on site that basically "fill the same purpose". Since then, we have seen beta groups incorporate some cults features and it has been getting more clear that eventually they're likely to be phased out and move to the new system. Keith said it wont happen until there is a replacement ready, but then again I dont think anybody expected beta groups to come live so soon...

nope, nobody did. and frankly, I don't see how they fulfill the same purpose at all. They have clearly defined different purposes imo, and I'm kinda afraid to see which functionalities we will be saying goodby forever to when they are finished.

Yeah, one of my concerns about that was every forum group potentially turning into a cult, which is probably the source of the current issue. Its "too much" for people who just wanted a ping now and then, but subscriptions definitely cant replace what forum groups were... so I'm at a loss here. Even if groups could get all cult features, there would have to be a way to "turn off" / differentiate cult!groups from regular groups so we wouldnt lose a feature thats so essential to forum navigation ._.

I didn't even think about commissions! I was just thinking and realizing- that like, I get commissioned for a cw, that person sells it on their thread and wants to ping like, customwear or my personal ping group, they won't be able to because people will need to be subscribed to the thread to get the ping, But if it's a brand new thread, how can they get users to subscribe? Does staff expect people to suddenly shell out cash to get billboards to advertise their shops so they can get people subscribing to their shop so they can sell an item? This makes no sense and will slow down the process, making it irritating and frustrating for both buyer and seller.

The average person- just on the internet alone- will not stick around for a site to load if it takes longer than 5 seconds for the site to appear. If you have to sit and wait for something to load, the person will usually just close the window and move on to something else. This is what subeta wants to ensure? That people will get fed up with having to do EXTRA things to get the same result that was far simpler before?

I don't get it....

What I thought they were planning before, after having read a discussion about what people want with the "cult revamp" (since it is just a buzz phrase now)- that they would take features that people use in the site forums and put them into usable applications in the individual cult forums, like pinging. So, people could use the ping feature to ping a user (like a fellow cult member) to a thread in the cult. I thought that was the direction they were going. It appears instead of putting that coding into the cults redone- they instead are taking cult features and adding them to the ping group feature instead of adding pinging features to cults. It's the totally opposite and stupid way to do things and doesn't actually make any sense. For example on how it should work: Facebook has an overall pinging feature. You put in a name and it pings that person to that comment or wall posting. They also have groups that are like private 'clubs' as it were and friends can talk on the wall of said group w/out the whole of facebook seeing the posts. (So they can talk about getting together and addresses and places w/out feeling as though some crazy person will see it)- and you can ping in these groups as well. The ping notification will say you have been pinged in the group and take you to the group. They didn't add group features to the pinging, they added the pinging to the group. You know? Subeta, you've just got it all backwards....

The other thing I realized, as someone pointed out that you can't count the 'average user' as the base line for applying such a change. You need to look at the above-average user. The one that spends hours onsite, the one that buys all the csc, that plays the games, that has a ton of achievements and/or posts on the forums- not the "average" user that spends little time online at all.

Overall, the idea of adding cult and forum features to a ping group negates the use of ping groups. And while Keith said that making it so people could just subscribe to a thread to get pinged would remove a lot of ping groups like it was a good thing, he doesn't realize that not all ping groups have their own threads that need to be subscribed to. Take the customwear ping group for example. It doesn't have a thread. It's not a cult or group as such. If you made it so it could only be pinged by the owner of the created thread, how are anyone that sells cw's suppose to use it?

NO SENSE AT ALL.

Ugh, headache and my blood sugar is low... /end rant

that makes a lot more sense.... but it could've saved a lot of hassle (and 13 pages of irate Subetans!) if it was announced and explained in the first place ;) I know you probably intended on doing that, and got sidetracked / hungry / needed sleep, but that kind of explanation does at least give us an informed reason for why a change has been / has to be made.

Will this in turn help the broken group pings to work properly, or is that glitch unrelated?

Okay the explanation for the shirts makes sense.

However the ping strain one does not. Now again, I don't know coding or anything of the sort but it seems to me that if when a post is made the whatever has to scan for pings, it shouldn't make a difference how many groups are in existence or how many groups a person is in. Say Group X and Y are both pinged in a post. The whatever scans it and sees this. It then sends out a ping to the user in the group. The system that scans shouldn't have to go through every single ping group in existence to see if it was pinged should it? That I could see causing strain. Likewise, people in many many groups shouldn't make a difference cause when they get that ping from group X the system shouldn't also have to verify if they are in group Z since group Z wasn't pinged.

I think if the limit is as low as is being considered we are going to see a lot more consolidation of ping groups. An artist who has three groups (say a cw, art commission, wip, etc) groups might be forced to just merge all those into one group. This makes one giant massive group as opposed to three smaller groups. The troubles that we've been having with the large ping groups not going through are because they are massive. This change seems counterproductive to me.

I hope at least some of that made sense and could be followed X_X

How would getting pinged in mass by the board creator to anyone subscribed to getting pinged be any different than the current ping group process, as you suggested on one page? Would that require less data/server use?

If you moved forward with that idea (subscribe to board for pings, OPer can ping in mass tp those subscribed), would there be a limit for that as well?

And, would it be possible for the OPer to like list 1-2 other users ss board admins who could also ping the subscribers to said board? That would be exceedingly helpful for CW shops as well as group run events (RPs, giveaways, cult boards, help guides, etc).

Even though the limit was supposed to be removed (at least for now), I am still not able to join more than 10 groups at a time. I know other users have also posted this, but I just want to also chime in my experience with this problem/bug in case you are too busy to read through all the previous posts in this thread.

Its not just limiting how people use the forums, its forcing us how we use the site.. like we're being forced to pick & choose aspects we went to be active on.

Either way. Cults aren't ping groups and really don't have anything in common other than cults using ping groups.

But, so what's the limit of how we can be involved now?

I forgot to add I wasn't intending to be condescending or anything at all, I'm no programmer obviously so I'm genuinely curious as to the difference xD;

That does make sense though, I hadn't thought about the information alreafy being there vs. having to be brought there. (The limit was 10 for normal users and 15 for GAs, too).

I think a suggestion board for this, gathering insight from all users (both unbothered and irate alike) might help. Personally I think subscription pings could work if there were levels put into place. Like only the creator can ping, only creator + designated users can ping + staff created mega boards (TS, hustler, events, etc) where anyone subscribed can ping. The latter would be nice since it's pretty typical of mega!group owners having blocked someone and that someone can't join the super helpful ping group because of it.

Anyways, glad the limit was removed for the time being and hopefully a resolve can happen c:!

I'm seconding 's post. After reading the explanation of how the ping system works and how the limits are supposed to help, I'm even more confused. It sounds like either it was poorly explained or the whole system is horribly inefficient, and limits aren't going to fix bad programming.

It's so frustrating being on this side of things and not having a clear idea of what's going on when changes like this are made. D: