Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Help test groups!

The bank has been taking their sweet time with paperwork that was only supposed to take a few days, thereby delaying epic memberships AGAIN.

But screw those guys, we don't need 'em. I'm working on groups instead.

Groups are far from complete. However, they're done enough to start playing with, so I've experimentally released them as an alpha version, with just two widgets to test with.

An alpha release means that development is ongoing, new features will arrive at a rapid pace, and changes to anything could happen at any time, including removing features that were originally written and then decided weren't a benefit. However, changes and bugs, some of them potentially severe, are expected at this stage. Use the groups feature at your own risk, remember to save copies of anything you wouldn't want to retype, and please, please report all problems that you have. If you don't like bugs, wait until groups have left the alpha stage.

I hesitated before doing this, because there exist many people in this world who don't have the patience to be guinea pigs and start flame wars at the first sign of inconvenience, much less actual problems. But thus far the community has been extremely supportive and helpful when it comes to rooting out bugs, suggesting ways to improve features, and being patient with the slow development schedule necessitated by one person writing everything. Given this fabulous atmosphere and my excitement to share what's being worked on with you, I thought it might be fun for everyone. And with increased feedback, there's even potential to end up with a better product than what I would have come up with with a super secret development stage.

I consider this a pilot program, to see if alpha releases of giant new features works out for all of us here at the RPR.

Excellent! New things to test

I've never made a group before @_@ this is fun and confusing all at once.

Oh, that reminds me. If you started a RP on the main site forums before groups were available, and you want to move it into a group forum, let me know. Make sure you've actually gone ahead and set up a forum first, though.

I am very excited. Groups will be a great way to meet other potential RP buds

I'm on a group.

Erm, in.

Since I'm getting a bunch of the same questions, I figured I'd just answer them all here so everyone can benefit.

Groups are in alpha and are currently unfinished. Lots of features are missing.

There is a loose to-do list of the most immediately needed stuff here.

Invites don't quite work yet. Setting your group to "invite only" effectively makes it into a locked group as of today. Getting them working is very high priority.

Group founders are currently always you, the player. There's a bunch of logistics being worked out to allow for characters instead, and this should be arriving quickly. You will be able to change whether you or your character is listed as the founder on already existing groups as well, no need to remake them.

Notifications for groups are overactive and shouldn't be sent to people who aren't group members, and may need to be addressed immediately rather than waiting until I shoot notifications in the face. You hear me notifications? I'm coming for you. Watch yourself. You shouldn't get notifications about people posting in groups you aren't a member of now.

Yes, there will be "breadcrumbs" added eventually to better guide you through setting up your groups, such as the big red arrows that appear on character editing pages that prompt you to pick a template or choose a friendly URL, but as features are still being added and the look and placement of the group editing pages is likely to change, I'm holding off on adding hand-holding until there's less danger of those arrows pointing to the wrong spot if I change the layout and forget to update all the breadcrumbs.

If you have more questions and suggestions, it's fine to put them here! Likely many people are wondering about the same things.

So.. I may be blind. But how do you remove yourself, or rather a character of yours that you've signed up under a self made group (or any group for that matter, not sure if there is a difference)? I'm unable to find it or just really missing it. I assumed it might have been similar to the game tags (as it appears next to one of them), and you'd just remove your character from there. Halp.

I have a few questions and suggestions!

Questions first.
Will groups be able to submit tags like the game tags at some point? (If not planned yet, imagine this under suggestions!)
Is there a way to remove members from a group? I derped and joined a group on the wrong character (curse you, alter egos!)

Suggestions next!
Can we have the ability to change the order of the boards on our forums, pleeeease?
It would be awesome if we could have some more formatting options about for the pages! Like the option to turn the group name off in favor of a fancy banner.
Applications bug me. It would be nice if we could turn those off.
Recent forum posts as a widget would be pretty nifty too!
Something helpful would be 'locking' the sidebar so that it's the same on every page rather than having to set the sidebar widgets on every page.

I'd also like to report that giving a group page a black background makes text and buttons unreadable when on the members page!

This is already available. You can set the icon on the "group appearance" page. You can see I'm using one here: http://www.rprepository.com/group/browsegroups.php on the Aria Academy.

This was throwing errors so I yoinked the link out. I'm working on ironing out the kinks and I should have it back in later tonight.

Already on the list.

I figured this would be requested and I'm sort of going round in circles about it. Putting important information in images, such as what the group is actually called, is anathema to search engines. If someone decides they eventually want to use RPR to host their group info, but no one can find the page when they type the group name's into Google, That's A Bad Thing. It looks like you've set your group name to be the same color as the background, which is one way to simulate it not messing with your page aesthetic.

You can set applications to be automatically accepted without you having to look at them by choosing "0 votes" under group settings. Is that what you mean?

For sure!

You have your Page Titles color set to black, so every title on the page, including titles for the membership table, is also black. Buttons currently take their background colors from the border color, and their text color from the Page Titles color. I'd set a different page title color at a minimum. You can probably manage without buttons having a distinct background color. See: here and here for a sense of how the colors are being reused.

We may or may not separate out all these things into their own category at some point in the future. I'm mildly concerned that it will turn into enough options to overwhelm and frustrate very quickly, and there is definitely a balance to be found between full customization and ease of use. What might happen is eventually have an "Advanced options" button that will offer you everything separately, for those who aren't easily intimidated.

Awesome! Thanks for filling me in and pointing out some derps As I do have a bad habit of derping and all.

Holy crap, Esoteric's icon looks awesome.

Gracias ma'am. It's one of Obsidian Dawn's lovely brushes! I love the shape of it and had to use it~

OKAY, there's now a link in group toolbars to allow accepted members to leave a group. Remember the toolbar can either be at the very top of the page or in the sidebar, depending on the group's preferences.

If your only membership is as the group's founder, you won't see the link. If you have characters in the group in addition to your foundership, you will.

I also fixed a couple bugs that was making some group buttons not function correctly in firefox. I haven't even begun to correct IE's BS. Sorry, but IE is one of the last things that gets fixed.

I'll work on admins booting people out of groups and letting founders be characters this weekend.

Please test and report, etc. etc.

Oh my gawd I am going to take a nap.

Removing a character from my secret group seems to have worked just fine, good job Kim!

Speaking of secret groups, could someone have a look at this character and tell me if you see one or two Darkness Saga icons at the top right?

I see two!

I see two. One is a regular game tag and one is a group tag.

That's what I thought. Thankyou both

Is anyone else seeing an issue where the red widget icons suddenly get HUGE when you drag them off the palette of offered widgets and over to one of the active areas to create a new widget on your page?

Also, is anyone else suffering from random new widgets appearing in their sidebar? I feel like I keep waking up to find more, but I'm not 100% sure that's not because I keep working until I'm basically insane with tiredness and then can't remember whether I added a bunch of random widgets myself just before bed to test something.