There's a story, supposedly true, about an architect who designed part of a  campus without paving paths between buildings.  He waited until the students wore paths, then paved where they walked.

Let's say me, Norm dplume, and Leeanne Joseph are chatting about the Mrs Blue story (which we are). A quick scan of us will tell you that the Mrs Blue thread is in the fantasy group (excludes Norm and Leeanne), and my overlap group with Norm is the Sci-fi group. My overlap group with Leeanne is TNBW-premium.

Now say Norm wants to comment on Mrs Blue. He's unlikely to start searching miscellaneous groups for a threat that just happens to be discussing her. And if he did, I bet he wouldn't be looking for an alien invasion story under her main thread in "fantasy". He'd be more likely to post under an overlap group.

Let us assume that I can't invite all my reviewers into one Mrs-Blue-related group because they're all at their limits (five or ten, pending) or from different genres and not interested.

In all likelihood, before the year is up, there will be four or five separate, concurrent Mrs Blue threads, which is more than she needs, as much as I like the concept of that.

Adding the ability to form more groups increases the dispersion factor... it increases the chance that Mrs Blue threads will pop up in different groups.

A 5-group limit forms a rather Keynesian guiding hand, steering us away from group swarms. I believe this is the gist of Sol's approach

-K

I sat down and thought long and hard about what Sol said about wanting the premium group to be the central forum, and I'm switching sides. I now agree that fewer groups is better.

Mainly because there aren't enough (regularly) active users to populate them all.

Partially because even with a five-group limit, we're already all over the place. Already there are interesting writing discussions I can't participate in. Raising the limit threatens to increase that number.

Since (as I understand it) free membership gets five groups now, and Premium ten groups, how will it be decided which groups a member can keep and which groups they can't if they drop to free status? Will it drop them from the latest ones they joined?

Not exactly. Premium members will get 10 groups. Free members will stay at three.

If a user downgrades, they can choose which three groups they want to keep.

Sol

Since (as I understand it) free membership gets five groups now, and Premium ten groups, how will it be decided which groups a member can keep and which groups they can't if they drop to free status? Will it drop them from the latest ones they joined?

Sincerely, The Girl With Perhaps Too Many Questions.

I also like the idea that Premium and Free--the membership groups--have a different status.

I'm going to think out loud about groups over the next week or two.

Ok. I give up. We'll raise the limit to 10 for Premium Members. It may take a couple of days for us to get around to it.

Sol

Ok. I give up. We'll raise the limit to 10 for Premium Members. It may take a couple of days for us to get around to it.

Sol

Sol, may I suggest you pull groups showing no activity for three to six months. That might help eliminate some of your concern about too many groups. If you put a written warning on the group page, it might discourage those fly-by-night members who join only for Strongest Start and disappear shortly thereafter, leaving behind a group taking up space.

Just a thought.

dags

PS you might also make it mandatory to have at least three members in the public groups.

Sol

Everyone belongs. Why wall the conversion off within a specific group? Premium has genre categories for all types of content, it can support any type of conversation. This is what I am not understanding. What is the purpose of starting all of these groups just to have a separate forum to talk when a central forum already exists?

The site appears to be urging us to be in groups. Everything I click seems to be telling me I should be in them. I had no idea until now that it wasn't the plan. Right from the main menu I was like "aw, what's my group?" and "where do I fit in the puzzle" and "Which groups will the people I know be in?"

To fix this, I'd recommend a change in the menus:

This would mean that premium and free would have to pretend they aren't groups. Viewing "My groups content" would display everything but those two groups. The main page would, by default, only show content from the one group (premium or free) and not put the word group on them (even though they technically are)

maybe even... "Groups Content" should read "Small discussion groups" or in some way give us a hint that they aren't meant for large collections of users to wall themselves away in.