Feedback Requested: Forum groups!
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I'm back, and looking for some more feedback / ideas / suggestions!
One feature that has worked out pretty well, but hasn't had attention in years is forum groups. They were built after the forums, so are a little tacked on. You can see the fully untouched page here.
My goal is to make improvements and keep them social, without tacking on more unneeded functionality. To me, things that have worked:
- Private forums
- Pings
Things that haven't worked:
- Shared bank (I see y'all using it to get around quests ;))
- Item purchases (what was that)
Are there things that you do want (I'm thinking about things that you've probably moved off site to Discord to get? Live chat? emojis? idk) that would make the forum group experience better, and keep you there for your conversations? Or get you to create new groups?
Things I've already planned, or built:
- Ping log: A page that lists all of the pings to the group that have happened, where you can click on the topic/post/location
- Ping improvements: Text from any comment field on the site (news comments, user comments, forum posts) will be run through the same processing pipeline, that'll send out events for user and group pings. That means mentioning a group in the news will now send out events!
- Search: The forums (including forum groups) will have search enabled, making it easier to find what you're looking for
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<li>let me pick if people are notified of me kicking them out of a group - sometimes i just want to quietly remove someone from a group without them knowing. not to reveal the Secrets, but i know some ppl just create new private groups instead of removing people from their groups because they don&;t want to remove people from groups as it notifies them, so i think this would be a great QoL improvement (and pretty easy to implement?)</li>
<li>let me HIDE hide my private groups - would be nice if no one can see certain groups if the group is fully hidden. like, they should not know it exists unless i say they can be in it type of hidden.</li>
<li>let me block people from joining my groups (even if they&;re public) - if i have someone blocked, i should be able to choose if they interact with my forum groups (just like i should be able to choose if they interact with my cw shop, although i know that&;s a conversation for another day lol). even if it&;s on a group-by-group basis, being able to &;blacklist&; users would be great.</li>
<li>sort & filter groups i am a part of - it&;d be great to be able to see which groups have been active recently and which ones havent so that i can leave the old ones that dont get any use anymore</li>
<li>polls - just would be nice to let people vote on things.</li>
<li>let me change the ping hashtag thing for my group - there&;s probably some kind of backend code reason for this, but would be a good QoL improvement. not vital, but especially could see it being useful if someone changes their username and had their username in their tag (for example, my cw group is # boocw, but if i changed my username... that would be confusing lol)</li>
<li>improved discoverability - not sure what a good solution would be here, but would be nice if there was a better way to browse groups. maybe tagging them? like, we could have a CW tag for groups related to CWs, an ART tag for groups related to art, a commissions tag, a social tag, a battle tag, etc. etc. i think this would increase the number of people talking and making friends and generally being social within groups.</li>
<li>don&;t let people spy on me in my private groups - i think this is still a thing, but i used to go into ppl&;s post history to see if they were slotting on cws i wanted in their private groups before they released the item. groups i wasn&;t a part of. i obviously couldn&;t access the full forum thread, but i could read individual posts by specific users by looking at their post history. this is kinda lame, especially if you&;re trying to have private conversations in private groups.</li>
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<p>i know that a lot of ppl use discord instead of subeta, and probably for a lot of reasons, but i do like the idea of getting more activity on the forums by improving the functionality of the forums & forum groups. i&;ve used both discord and the forums. i do like the idea of having a forum group chat functionality as i could definitely see myself transitioning to using this instead of discord for the handful of things that i do on discord, and i think there are opportunities specifically in cws to further integrate forums and forum groups into this process, but here are some thoughts i have about discord vs. forums (not specifically the forum GROUPS, but they&;re pretty intertwined and also i just am trying to give my perspective so that yall [the problem solvers :) ] can turn it into magic or something!)
benefits to discord: </p>
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<li>i don&;t have to host images externally - i&;m not sure if this is something subeta can feasibly solve, but i just copy/paste an image into discord and there it is. i don&;t have to go to imgur and host it there to be able to show ppl the image like i do on the forums.</li>
<li>WYSIWYG editor - i can just CTRL+B on my keyboard to bold stuff, CTRL+U to underline, etc. much easier than typing the BB code, but this is a small thing.</li>
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<p>anyway, these are just my initial thoughts. i&;ll come back if i have more thoughts but im very in favor of updating forum groups!
thank you!!!! this is great, I've got some thoughts
- Totally fair, you should be able to remove people without them getting notified. Will add!
- I'm doing this!
- Hmmm.... someone being blocked by / blocking an admin of the group should make it not possible for them to join, maybe I'll make that a new setting (it's very easy to add new settings now)
- working on this!
- polls are going to be an actually working part of the new forum system (which these new groups are part of, from the ground up!) so they should carry over just fine
- yeah, the difficulty is just that it'd stop working if you have it pinged anywhere, we wouldn't be able to go through posts / comments / etc and make the hashtag update. no other coding issue, just that it'd make a lot of ugly old hashtags everywhere
- yes! i want to make them easier to make, easier to tag and make clear what they're for, and easier to find the ones you should be in.
- :( yes, completely agree. with the new forums each forum, topic and post have "gates" for who can see them, and should be a lot less prone to showing up around the site in places they shouldn't. it's a completely broken system now, it should be much much much better
1 & 2: ✨ both done! ✨ the forums/news/etc are getting a WYSIWYG bbcode editor, with those same keyboard shortcuts. And, if you drag an image (up to a certain size, obviously) into the editor, it'll upload to our free image hosting (within reason). Very excited to actually be able to post images on the forums again :P
I really want to do some work on events in general and I think you've given me the push here to make it so that they don't just group by category, but also stack on top of each other for events from the same source and can be expanded. That'd be a HUGE improvement, and is possible with the new system. Thank you!
Yeah, this is largely about improving the whole "communication" across the site, starting with forums (and groups) and extending to sMail and profile/news comments. The same pinging mechanism will be used across all of them, for example (and the editor mentioned above). All existing sMail will likely be made read-only (I need to write a forum post about smail, of all of the terrible things I've done, it's probably the worst) with the ability to look at it.
excuse me, I believe you mean the old CULT system 😠why couldn't i just name things normal. What kind of customization would you want to be able to do? Something like the notepad widget, where you can just write whatever, and use it as a kind of place to keep updated, or with separate pages or ...
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I completely understand feeling that way. However, one of my goals is to make the "public" (which is the majority) groups more present on the home page of the forums, even if you aren't part of the group. For example, a trending topic in a completely public group might show up in recent topics or posts, pushing folks to join to chat on those topics.
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