First thing, the system is really amazing. Nice work!
My big comment is that I find the seperation of groups and forums to be unnatural. I think of the groups as really live chat (like mega). Is there a way to create a unified forum/group page. The group would be like a shoutbox/mega/slack on top of the forum. That way, bigger discussions naturally feed into the forum and live chats feed into the group… Also can the display format of the group be made lighter weight for more interactivity?
Seriously, though, this is quite an achievement in such a short period of time.
There is a way to lock forums into Groups only. One of the Groups tabs will be “discussions” and it will load in a designated forum. This works if you want to focus Groups first and make your forum system invisible.
However, that would mean every time we wanted a forum space we would have to create a Group for it as well. And as you can see, we have a lot of forum spaces we want to utilize.
So we have kept Groups and Forums detached. Groups are for social networking style interactions, “shout boxes”, timelines/feeds, connections, etc. Forums are for long-form discussions. They serve two different purposes and are both important to have.
As for live chat, we have that coming in a later release. Something we can utilize for live events, webinars, etc. But would also allow people to quickly chat with anyone who is currently online in a group.
@kmorros created a forum (love connection) that works the way I mentioned. If you click the forum space, it takes you to the group page->discussion tab. So the forum and group are tightly coupled (pun intended?).
I guess I was thinking more of a group being like a shoutbox as opposed to a fully seperate system. I think it is still a bit confusing even when there are two tabs. We may decide to see how it goes, but my suspicion is that one will “win” and receive the content. Most likely the one that appears by defaut or earlier in the list.
We do have control over presentation, but this coupling is not likely the way we’ll go for production. It’s just too limiting and puts the forum system in the background, which we want to be more of a focus.
I was originally confused about forums and groups, but I kind of like being able to toggle back and forth.
But I think, maybe this is Tom’s point, when they are listed all as communities can be confusing – or canwe add a descriptor/subtitle or I guess (2) woudl be turning off in that form.