Features that compete for Activity

Some of you already tested some of the new community features when they were online on monday – unluckily just for a few hours, because we had severe performance problems.

I already read some questions in the forums about the group feature and want to go into why we realized it the current way.

Groups in other social networks often time have two different functions:

1. they just exist as a kind of tags, and the majority of people in the group just joined it because they want the group name as a funny or describing punchline in their profile.

2. they really exist as communication channels, being a small, active kind of forum in themselves.

That double function already is a downside: if you want to use a group as 2., you ask a question in it and then are disappointed because of those 10,000 guys in the group no one replies. They all just use it as a decorative tag, but no one told you.

So a group should be marked properly whether it is an active group or a mere tag.

But next to confusion and disappointment, there is a second danger in such groups: If you have a certain activity by users around some topic, splitting that activity can be very harmful. Imagine we had two "Live Poker" areas in our general forum. Some threads would not get any attention, because some readers would concentrate on the other forum. In fact, that is the reason many small forums do not work at all: the founder creates 20 sub-forums from day one, spreading the little activity he has too thin.

If we now had groups with an integrated forum, this danger would be imminent for us: suddenly, there could be two areas for every important topic: the group and the forum.

That is why our groups in this first version of our community features do not have a small forum or even a pinboard on their own. But we've got one thing to bring groups and forums closer together!

An admin can link a group to some destination of his choice. This link will be shown in the group, but also would the according group be marked by a small crown in all group lists. So people instantly see that this group "links somewhere".

The most common use case for that will be linking to forums or even specific threads. I'll give you two examples:

I. Aachen
Aachen is my home town, and it happens to have a specific local sub-forum in the German forum.
So if you visit the group, you will see the link leading to that forum:
http://www.pokerstrategy.com/community/group/g80/Aachen.html

II. Confidential
I also found a group about this blog. If you like it, you can join it. And if someone sees the group, he can also instantly follow the link to this blog. http://www.pokerstrategy.com/community/group/g184/Confidential.html

If you have a look at my profile, you will see how these "extended" groups look like in a group list:
http://www.pokerstrategy.com/community/profile/Xantos

They are marked by a small yellow crown. And you can not just enter the group, but also directly navigate to the specific target of the group directly by clicking on the link behind. 

What can you do?

A. Found interesting groups

B. If you think that your group is clearly related to some forum, thread or even a news or someone's profile, tell your community manager (e.g. by opening a thread in the feedback forums of your language). He can take care that your group will be linked to the fitting site/forum!

C. Join other interesting groups to give them a meaning by sheer size & popularity. You can even help some cause (like a certain forum you think of having too little activity) by making it more popular that way!

I opened up a thread in our English forum about that topic. You can use it to talk about the feature, but also to suggest some "extended" groups and their outgoing links!
The thread: http://www.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=33775