Groups: admin features new and old, loved and hated

What are the current plans for the Groups features? Are they going to function exactly the same, right down to how permissions work? .Cause some thing were ... Not optimal.

Were you ever a group admin? What did you love about the interface and admin tools? What did you hate?

Comments

  • edited June 2015
    Okay, so here's my first braindump about this.

    I'd like for group admins to be able to remove other admins - perhaps you'd have to get agreement from another admin, but you'd be able to remove players who had gone inactive or hostile when needed.

    In the old setup, we had membership "levels" that were strictly hierarchical. I'd like for a more dynamic ability to set membership types, rather than levels alone. There should be a hierarchy but there were cases where I wanted to designate types of members that were equivalent to each other. There was also a functional limit to the number of membership levels you could use in the old game - it seemed you could make lots of them but they system borked if you had more than 100 members and more than 3 or 4 types.

    You should be able to have a separate forum area, and possibly chat, for the group admins - or just to be able to whisper to admins in the main chat would be so helpful.

    Be able to link group membership to new game elements like: homestreet routes (hopefully via signpost), Group-owned Locations (GoLs) like Temples/Halls and club houses.

    I'd like for admins to be able to pre-emptively prevent someone from being able to join a group - like banning, but instead the option is just never there.

    I'd like for the intermediate level of group privacy settings to be functional. In the old game, you could be public, and open to anyone who wanted to click the button, or you could be private, be hidden, and require an invitation to join, but there should have been an intermediate setting where your group is public, and you could request an invite to join. It just didn't work.
  • SB, apologies if I'm being dumb --I've never been an admin for a group. I'm wondering about the need to be able to preemptively ban players. Why is there a need for this? I'd be concerned that it could be abused. Also what would admins need to talk privately about that couldn't be dealt with using other existing functionality? Thanks.
  • edited July 2015
    hoooo ... that's a complicated question to answer, actually. But there were situations where someone left the group acrimoniously, and then re-joined in order to read the group forums, then left again. Unless you kick/banned them while they were a member then you couldn't stop this. And also to preemptively ban the alts of people who were hostile to the group or the group's members in ways that weren't bannable from the game itself. You're right, it could be abused in the sense that some people wouldn't be able to join a group that they wanted to, but I feel like it would be harder to exploit this feature for maliciousness? Maybe I'm wrong about that though.
    And admins talked about things related to the kind of low-key, unofficial modding of our chat channel we did, as well as discussions about how to handle interpersonal issues that came up that affected the group as a whole. In other cases, like HRR, admins talked about what kind of new group features we wanted to roll out, how they should work, etc.
  • edited July 2015
    There should be a forum section for each group either for request to sign up or for updates/news/events, for the group. You should be able to assign a # of Assitant Admins, when online, a member should be able to message a Admin, or Asst, from the group listing in the chat. Admins should be able to block . There should be a mini group whisper for group admins and assistants alone. The alts of people you do not want to join is almost impossible to block, you could block people with more than one account per i.p. address but then that makes it so other household members can not have an account, and i find that highly unfair, vs the occassional we have a spy issue with alts. Groups are private so being able to block someone from joining a group only means they dont get along with the group and or how the leader wants to run it, and there are some people that are just simply very toxic. Should be able to block a person when still a member and they stay blocked even when they leave , and have a kick from group feature as well, that is not a block but a way to clear out inactive people. The block and kick feature should be whether they are online or not in the forum as well as chat. There should be a way to send any group admin or asst a in game mail, from the chat or from the forum, as well as a mail for the group as a whole for admin and asst. And there should be a checklist of various options that you can assign each group rank, with group Admin being everything and the leader can not be kicked and asst's have full rights but can not delete the group and can not change what the ranks mean but can change the ranks of members, (except the Admin & other Asst )only the Admin can delete the group and no one can kick the leader. Only the Admin can kick Asst. This makes it so there is some safety for the group leader and if the leader does go inactive the group can still function. If the leader does not log on for x amount of months the group should default its ownership to the asst that is the most active. Assistants can not kick or ban Asst's or Admins only members
  • I remember reading about an interesting feature for dealing with problematic users that Glitch had.

    Basically, the player causing trouble would be teleported into a room with one or more staff members, who would try to talk out the issue with them. If the player continued to act badly, their character would be tied to a chair and the player would be kicked out of the game, as their character is now in "Time Out".

    I liked this because it took a very nice approach—try to talk things out like adults, and if that doesn't work, only then is the player treated like a child.
  • edited July 2015
    The room is still around but that was for actual staff reprimands and had nothing to do with groups , groups are more along the lines of Clubs or Guilds in other games
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