Very displeased to see a change made to forum groups that forbids owning more than 5 forum groups at once. I don't recall seeing an announcement about this, and my first encounter with the new rule was when I tried to create a new forum group a few minutes ago and received an error message. There is no notice of this rule on the Forum Groups home page or creation page.

[edit] To be clear, you can own more than 5 groups (because I do haha), but you can't create any new ones if you have more than 5.

As an active player who uses groups for a variety of purposes - promotion of my CWs, my non-cw art, and holiday events, as well as useful community pings - having such a small limit means that I'm already over the limit by several groups. I've deleted a couple of unused groups, and I'm still over the limit. Ping groups are one of the few ways to gain traction/attention to anything in the forums, and with their private forums are a vital way to collect important information all in one place without cluttering the public forums and risking locked threads, spamming, and so on there. Overusing a ping or misusing a ping for multiple purposes tends to be seen as annoying spamming by group members, so having a variety of different groups to ping is vital.

Please consider increasing the limit to 10 groups, at the very least. The Forum Groups system in general needs a lot of attention as it is, but they are still very useful. If they take up too much server space or make the site slow, perhaps a compromise of 5 full groups (equipped with forum space), and 5 or more ping-only groups (no forum space)?

[edit] Big Happy Edit!

has informed us that the 5 group limit was unintentional, and the new/current limit is 20 groups per person. :)

Wow. I DO NOT like this. As a CW releaser and someone who partakes in seasonal events (which require the creation of special groups to run), I don't think 5 groups is nearly enough. :( Also wondering why a change like this wasn't announced at all. I hope the limit will at least be bumped up if not removed.

Don't be surprised if the only way to get an increase is through GA-only. :s

I mean, that's fine I guess as a GA perk since I know GA attractiveness needs work. I have a GA, though, sooooo it's not currently a GA thing.

GA could always use more incentives, wouldn't be a bad addition imo.

Wait, what?

Absolutely not! Even as one who isn't actively partaking of forum groups, this just reeks of "ABSOLUTELY THE HECK NOT." Especially with no announcement or anything? We have indeed entered a phase of Subeta staff not communicating.

Really disappointed that this was put in place without any warning. Really shitty thing to do especially when many of us have different forum groups for our CW releases among other things.

For a site that wants people more active on the forums this is really not a good way to go about it.

Now I’m left wondering what else staff has changed without telling us anything.

Is there even a way to see how many forum groups we own?

I agree, I'm one of the supporters for a GA overhaul and this wouldn't be a bad perk. I don't know if that's what they're working toward, but I'm against sneaking it into the policy without any notice beforehand.

I was able to create a new group for a seasonal event in October, so this change has been made sometime since then. I assume it's part of the site overhaul we've been enduring since November. I'm really hoping for a big announcement soon of all the changes made to the site, I assume this isn't the only change that hasn't been openly announced.

Yes, some kind of notice would have been nice. I was on the verge of creating a new group I thought would be helpful for hosting events/motivating users to be active, but I can't without deleting groups that I've been actively using for several years. As I said above, I hope we get a comprehensive guide/announcement of all the changes soon.

I just wanna find a way to see what groups I own without having to go through the huge list of groups I'm part of and finding them one by one... is there a way we can see which we own?

Nope, you have to go through the Your Groups page one by one to see what groups you own. There was a great suggestion about reorganizing the groups page a while back, but none of the feedback has been implemented.

[edit] Really REALLY amazing forum groups suggestion thread.

as far as I know, this limit has actually always been a thing!! I remember several years ago (2014? 2015? I could be wrong but at LEAST 2016 if not before) I couldn't have more than five; I remember having to delete a 'mint addicts unite!' group and I was tore up about it because it was back when specific niche ping groups for cw pinging purposes was a thing lmao. I do absolutely agree that it should be displayed somewhere though!!!

the ability to have more with a GA would be FANTASTIC! even upping it to 10 would be amazing. my only concern would be what happened if your GA lapsed - would the group be completely deleted? which group would? would there be a way where you could pause your group if your GA lapsed to avoid it getting deleted?

if those things could be solved I would 100% be on board though. it'd be another awesome incentive!

I just... wow... I'm seriously scared to know what else was changed that wasn't announced...

I finally started getting back into subeta and trying to be more active after really being in a slump for a few months and barely doing much... but this just really makes me lose that motivation again :(

its definitely not that old of a rule because I had many more groups than 5 and one was created within the last 18 months

Well, I had 8 or 9 in October and was able to create a new group for a seasonal event then. So, I don't know if the limit was increased after your experience, or if my experiences were a glitch?

Try not to get discouraged, my friend! I'm irritated, but this is a small thing in the long run.

that's so weird! I'm wondering if maybe they removed the limit some time, then put it back into place? This is DEFINITELY not an entirely new thing though. I had to delete a group to make my CW commission ping group and that was a loooong time ago.

edit: 2014 was when I created my cw commission ping group and had to delete mint lovers lol :s just found my old comm thread which was created shortly after, in July 2014.

Yeah, it's possible they increased the limit at some point, then introduced a cap again recently. I assume it was done sometime after the site overhaul in November.

If we had a way to quickly find what groups we owned it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but having to go through the big list of what groups we're in to find which our ours is really what's getting to me.

If we need a limit, okay I can understand but either: TELL US and don't just sneakily put it into effect without notice OR make an easy way for us to see what forum groups we own to see which are maybe inactive and can be deleted.

Yeah, even something simple as a star next to our owned groups would help. In the meantime I'll plug this great thread of suggestions for forum groups (including some great mock ups for reorganizing them) that I tried to link to you earlier, but isn't showing up because I edited a preview comment. Really REALLY amazing forum groups suggestion thread.

I'm probably the owner of well over 20 for my biting group. We have a group for every zombie strain, and it's honestly the smoothest biting system I've seen since I started. I am honestly at a loss of what to do because we have to make four more this year. Even if I let one my friends do that, that's 4/5 slots taken for them.

Please stop with unannounced changes.You cannot make changes like these and not tell us or let us participate in the decision making. It ruins a lot of things players do to streamline their site experience.

Like honestly. Fuck.

I have more choice words but they would be against the community guidelines.

While I don't use ping groups all that often myself, I know quite a few people (especially group admins and such) who run many events/contests/raffles/etc. and use lots of ping groups. That still doesn't make me as upset about the lack of communication, however.

Just last week I posted a news comment on one of the updates we got about the Free Shop. I had said that it sucked we were getting so many errors, but I was impressed with the amount of communication and hoped staff kept it up. That seems to have been a one-off thing and we're back to absolutely no communication again.

As I've said many times before, I believe a lot of users would accept these changes a HECK OF A LOT more willingly if they were actually communicated with us instead of just being implemented with no announcements.

I am currently hosting most of the VIP ping groups for Survival on behalf of the nvlb service thread. It would have been a catastrophe to discover this secret rationing only once we tried to make the four(?) new ones a week into the event.