Secret Private Groups
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Well that sucks. Now it's hard to prove my point
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<cranky oldman voice>
"back in my day mangolassi had a box on their home page that clearly defined what they were about"</cranky oldman voice> -
So, for me, the challenge is trying to think about what makes some private groups obviously wrong and some seem like they are fine when, at the technology level, I can't make them into different things.
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Because if we don't have the private groups here, they will (and do) exist anyway. That's the biggest challenge. That people have conversations in private is going to happen no matter what. The question really is.... should they do it on this technology platform for certain cases, or should they not?
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Absolutely - bring those private groups here for the stated purposes. The last thing anyone should want is the requirement to log into dozens of different sites when they are all controlled by the same people.
This is the problem I was mentioning in a different thread (I think). The primary group has around 100 subgroups and each of those subgroups have their own website/forum. This makes staying up to date with all of them a HUGE pain. If they all flew under one flag, one forum - sure it would be HUGE but it would be easier ultimately.
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I see your point and I'm glad that this level of thought is going into it. Although I am still not 100% on board with the idea it is something for me to think about.
Obviously the decision is not mine and I'll still be here regardless. -
@Dashrender said:
This is the problem I was mentioning in a different thread (I think). The primary group has around 100 subgroups and each of those subgroups have their own website/forum. This makes staying up to date with all of them a HUGE pain. If they all flew under one flag, one forum - sure it would be HUGE but it would be easier ultimately.
Subgroups are something I fear. We have that at Gamrhaus and it makes a little more sense there but is still a nightmare and was probably a bad idea (and maybe we should collapse them.)
We've tried really hard to have some logical groups here that are few and make sense and don't overlap.
One of the interesting things with the private groups is that they can be temporary and archived by having a "hidden" top level "archive" group and when a group is done with its purpose it can be moved there so that posting stops but so that people who need to view the content still have a means of reaching it. But the clutter goes away as the group effectively becomes invisible, even to its own users.
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You're right Scott - managing subgroups can be a huge pain. But the alternative of dumping everything, even though it's related can make things completely unusable.
Example.
My Star Wars group has about 100 subgroups around the world (www.501st.com for those that don't know). If we all used the same forum, and under that forum used the same subgroup just for upcoming gatherings, there would be at least 100 active threads at any one time. Since most displays show between 15 and 20 threads at a time, that would take a lot of scrolling to find your specific thread.
But if we create a subgroup for each of those 100 units, then under that create another subgroup for gatherings, that list is now down to 3-10 active threads at a time. Much more manageable.
If you are going to find yourself in a location belonging to anther group, you just find that unit in the subgroups, then find their gatherings sub-subgroup and post about your interest.
Currently with each unit having it's own website/forum, you have to find that site, then create a logon, then wait while it's authenticated (I've seen it take months - yeah that's sad), then find the gatherings area.. etc.. what a pain.
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@Dashrender would tagging not have fixed that? Have a tag for the location, type of interest, time period, group name or whatever is appropriate?
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Thank you for all your input everyone. This is something Scott and I have discussed many times. If we decided to keep these private areas open (right now it's more for testing the functionality than anything else) it will have been a very thought out decision.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender would tagging not have fixed that? Have a tag for the location, type of interest, time period, group name or whatever is appropriate?
So you search by tags? I suppose that could work, I've never used tags as a way to find something before, heck I have barely ever #tagged something before... but then again i hardly use things like Twitter or anything else that uses tags (yeah I know FB supports Tags, but I never understood how they worked).
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender would tagging not have fixed that? Have a tag for the location, type of interest, time period, group name or whatever is appropriate?
So you search by tags? I suppose that could work, I've never used tags as a way to find something before, heck I have barely ever #tagged something before... but then again i hardly use things like Twitter or anything else that uses tags (yeah I know FB supports Tags, but I never understood how they worked).
Go to the tag page and try it out. This is the modern taxonomic approach to using metadata to make threads categorized without requiring a strict hierarchy. @andyw and I did a lot of research on this stuff years ago after building the world's more complex, herarchical medical facility management system and finding out that the nature of a hospital was that it could not be put into a hierarchy, it just doesn't work that way.
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That totally makes sense. Today so many postings, or just information itself does not seem to fit within a small little box of hierarchy so I can definitely see how this could help.
Does the user have to choose to tag these key words, or are they picked up automatically? If it's a manual process, how did you get physician buy-in to choose the needed tags?
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@Dashrender on ML, you can add tags at topic creation (or edit)
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@Dashrender said:
Does the user have to choose to tag these key words, or are they picked up automatically? If it's a manual process, how did you get physician buy-in to choose the needed tags?
Hopefully with practice people tag well, just by spending time thinking about it and watching other people and attempting to use tags themselves. But, in reality, the mods do a lot of manual tag additions and modifications.
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Can someone TL;DR this all for me?
How does one join a secret private group plotting to take over the world?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Does the user have to choose to tag these key words, or are they picked up automatically? If it's a manual process, how did you get physician buy-in to choose the needed tags?
Hopefully with practice people tag well, just by spending time thinking about it and watching other people and attempting to use tags themselves. But, in reality, the mods do a lot of manual tag additions and modifications.
Mods tagging work well in a paid forum, and might even work well in a free one where the mods really enjoy that sort of thing.. and there is constant turn over in the mod (because I have to think that would get old pretty quickly).
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@MattSpeller said:
Can someone TL;DR this all for me?
How does one join a secret private group plotting to take over the world?
They start by changing their name to The Brain.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Does the user have to choose to tag these key words, or are they picked up automatically? If it's a manual process, how did you get physician buy-in to choose the needed tags?
Hopefully with practice people tag well, just by spending time thinking about it and watching other people and attempting to use tags themselves. But, in reality, the mods do a lot of manual tag additions and modifications.
Mods tagging work well in a paid forum, and might even work well in a free one where the mods really enjoy that sort of thing.. and there is constant turn over in the mod (because I have to think that would get old pretty quickly).
In theory the mods only need to clean up a little. In practical terms, though, I have the bandwidth to do this for a site far, far busier than ML and have in the past. Doing tag updates is a fraction of the work of catching all missed, unanswered threads in SW which I used to do alone for a long time before giving up mod powers there. That process was far slower and more intensive. So for a long time, we don't really have an issue with throughput for it.
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Well we have concluded the experiment with the secret, private groups on ML and we really appreciate everyone's feedback and consideration on this. The result is that we feel that this could have worked but the opinions of people who were using the private groups was that they were not useful or would be useful but the overwhelming volume of public ML traffic made them less than useful. So the idea wasn't necessarily bad, but it just isn't what people were going to want it to be.
So at this time, the private groups are being disabled and shut down. There has been no traffic on them for at least a month anyway, they just ended up not being used (partially because we had already moved to another platform for testing at that point.)
So anyone who had concerns that this was not a good use of the ML platform, have no fear, the private groups are no more
