Groups for OS - The Nth iteration

phreak

Yo!

Exactly as described. My communities are growing, the categories and discussion lists are speedy as the Japanese Shinkansen (btw. the bullet train gets 50ty today happyBirthday)... and i need the real phantasma to help my community grow. Now or never, before the deadly decline of my community is emerging... I'm a hell rider... a community manager with eyes wide open... and I need the ultimate drug to grow my population:

GROUPS

Who else has these symptoms? Who is willing to deploy large quantities of code for this addiction.
What's the current market value? Junkies, let's put our dollars in a pot. Let us find the best dealer.

the phreak!

peregrine

probably would help if you defined what you want and maybe some developer might have an inkling of exactly what you are looking for.

Groups as a word implies not a whole lot.

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phreak said: I'm a hell rider.

and if I may paraphrase a previous saying you made once "but that doesn't mean you need to ride the devils horse"

hgtonight

Perhaps use this as a starting point:

http://docs.vanillaforums.com/addons/groups/

R_J

Is "Yet Another Group Application" coming to us?

phreak

The Vanilla-Team made a really versatile Group integration from what i could see on the hosted version. I think there have been Core Groups features all across the internet that do have a certain function set that proved to be practical. In Vanilla's terms it may be more important to outline how it will integrate in the current Vanilla terminology. What basically means a good integration regarding the discussion list and the roles settings. With the appropriate rights or role Grourp Admins could use work in his group like a regular admin uses the a Vanilla forum frontend.

Users can: create/join/post to/view/leave/invite to a group

Admins can do the same but also:

• ... write a short information text, upload a group picture and name groups
• ... define the visibility of a group (which determine if its discussions can be read)
• ... can handle invitations settings (user invite or only admin invite)
• ... might have the ability to delete and edit every post (based on roles)
• ... possibility to create announcements on top of the list
• ... can kick users from a group

The basic look might just be like a discussion list category view with buttons to join the group or leave it. Additionally there comes a header image and some group attributes (Created on: XX.XX.XXXX, Number of Users: XXX, Admin: XXXX). If a user joins a group the topics could be added in his regular discussion list view (with CSS the list items could hold a different color than regular category discussions). A Meta should be given next to the list item title telling the groups name where in the regular discussion list the category name can be found. Admin can define settings of a group.

Just a short shot on it... maybe you have more and better inputs. I'd be willing to make a bigger initial investment. Maybe it could be a joint operation by 2 or 3 Vanilla developers? I'd love to see the finesse of YAGA in here too.

@Linc: Regarding recent thoughts and developments on the OS part of Vanilla: The hosted version of Groups is not going to get open sourced soon or sold solely to OS customers or? (I know we had those questions already, but i just mind asking again before we double the amount of work here. As i'm so keen to see things like the new editor get released for OS).

Edit: Sorry for the bad layout of the list and text above. But Markdown doesn't work here with me.

hgtonight

@R_J said:
Is "Yet Another Group Application" coming to us?

More like Yay (Yet Another Yaga).

subdreamer

I'm down to donate for the development of YeAGA (Yet Another Group Application)! *ahem* @hgtonight‌

businessdad

Why not YAGrA - The groups application that doesn't make things hard.

hgtonight

So... Kind of like tagging with a specific landing page? Or a special category?

Linc

@phreak We will never sell an addon. It's antithetical to how we approach open source.

I don't foresee us open sourcing our Groups implementation. I regard it as an Enterprise-grade feature that should explicitly not be used on small- to medium-sized forums, so personally it's not something I'd even advocate for internally. If you have the resources to run your own enterprise self-hosted forum, you don't need our Groups code.

phreak

@hgtonight: I think it's like a category view width some additionals (the #Panel could only feature Group Related modules). With @peregrine's Category Headers and some CSS, it's also possible to come close to a group view but there is far more in the functionality that integrates with some role and user managment. AND for sure the whole join group/leave group/accept user/remove user from group functionality and some special rights.

@Linc: Ok, thanx for info. I'd say i have a medium sized forum, about 2.000 active users a month. 125.000 visitors a month and about 740.000 page impressions. The forum now gets more and more crowded and a additional Groups feature would help a lot in sorting the crowd in different channels, what will give users more oversight and makes them stay longer. 2.000 active users make the things actually very speedy. If it's too fast.... users tend to leave, because it's too stressfull. Groups can give back the identity of a person inside a social room, without being overrun by all the noise. So i think this is also an argument for growing from medium to large-sized. Regarding resources, in my case i'd call it... time invested (not money or people).

peregrine

you could probably make some viewing preferences based and compartmentalize a group in a similar way And adjust which panels are shown and what is shown, etc. in a similar way as.

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/customhomepage-plugin

Having separate group permissions for Admins and Moderators would be a different story.

peregrine

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