[Suggestion] Can we increase group activities?

So I’m a member of several groups now, but from what I see the groups are dead-ish. There’s so few way to manage or promote activities in a group. I mean you have:

  • A chat: not many people go to Chat, and when they do they rarely switch away from English room.
  • A ladder: we already have site-wide ladder which is already a superset.
  • Group notifications: nothing to do with us commoners.
  • Group tournament: this one is good.

Many group I’ve joined was created and very soon went dead. It doesn’t provide any support for people of (probably) common interest. It’s hard to have interactions and with its current state, English chat room and private messages already covered all that it does.

I only know about the same mechanic in KGS (The room - which is both “group” and “chat”). Although it’s not the best for group admin (I’ve managed a room for my university room there, and later discarded it), one way it’s better than OGS’ group is that it has a “local” sense. When you enter a room, you can see who’s talking to who, and who’s playing with whom - just like an irl go club.

Occasionally a newbie would come up and be like “Senpai teach me!” and then a Senpai will jump out and be like “Let me show you how it’s done”. Then people see a new game was created in the room, people jump in to join the kibitz, and then Senpai lost because obviously the other guy was a sandbagger, and he logged his main account which is 5dan and people laugh like mad.

Note that it is only fun for everyone because it’s a small community, you’re safe trolling someone you know, and no one feel bitter (ok maybe sometime the Senpai will feel bitter but then everyone will just buy more popcorns).

On OGS it’s a bit hard because most people only have 1 tab opened for OGS, so you either play or chat. You have to be actually dedicated to chatting to have 2 more tabs opened (for English chat and the group chat).

For OGS, is there anyway to implement a sense of community in group?

“Group-specific games” could be a good start but what I mean more importantly is, like you know guild in MMO games? When you’re online you kinda have a passive acknowledgement of what’s going on in the guild. I’d rather join only a few group I care about and have constant feedback from it, than join a whole bunch of dead group with rarely any interaction.

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Thought Bubble

I have one small idea that might help. Interested to know what you think of it:
What if there was an option in the chat menu to combine all the channels that you have selected to open. Currently, group chat is very hit & miss. Mostly miss. If I could open the Fast Corresp. chat and then see it in this ‘Combined’ chat then people might be more inclined to use the group chats for targeted conversations/announcements/chat.

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I say forget it. Running OGS is hard as it is. I don’t think a lot of fluff features are going to be implemented any time soon.

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Combining chats is frontend stuff (changes can be written by any interested user).
anoek has to accept the changes through.

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Group activity isn’t something you improve by adding features.

You do so by communicating with the members on a regular basis. It’s called organization - at least one person has to provide a steady heartbeat to make sure the whole thing doesn’t atrophy.

You can start by chatting with some people, cough asking for their ideas, starting a regular chat schedule, regular voice chat - enhanced game+review nights, regular streams, etc.

Provide a nice place to be.

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While what you’re saying is true anywhere. It doesn’t work only with the admin’s effort.

I’ll continue with this forum example: when people log in the forum, they can see all that is - and was - going on in the forum. When there’s a discussion, they can join it. When someone do anything that remotely related to them - mentioning their name, replying to their thread, liking their post - they receive a notification and even an email telling them about it.

Back to the group:

  • When people login, they don’t go to the group chat
  • When they go to chat, they don’t go to the group chat. They go to English chat.
  • When people was in the chat and play a game, they leave the group chat.

The above 3 points make it extremely hard to “stay connected”.
So when do they receive notification? When a group admin make an official announcement in the group. People would receive notification, but there’s no way for them to have a say in it. Sure they can PM the admin, but it’s a personal activity, it doesn’t make any bubble in the tranquil lake of the group.

IIRC you don’t even receive notification about other group activity like tournament or like anything else, so if the admin forget to make an announcement, no one would know about it.

This make group management extremely tiresome. There’s no passive interaction. If you make a group, you would have to constantly organize events in at least a weekly basis to keep the group lively. All of the groups I’ve joined don’t have the effort to do that. All of them look dead to me.

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A few ideas that i’ve already suggested before, but did somehow got forgotten or something:

  • Group pages should have similiar small box for the chat as tournaments do. Currently groupchats aren’t that popular, mainly because there isn’t any link between the chatroom and the group with it’s context, and the chat is not accessible from the group pages. I think this should be pretty easy to implement, since it’s already on tournament page.

  • Tournaments from groups i’m a member in should make a similiar timer countdown like sitewide tournaments do. Maybe on a different colour do identify those faster.

  • Group admin should have the right to change the settings for group ladders. Chinese group could use chinese rules, fast corr. group could use faster settings, and maybe even the sunjang baduk group could use a forked opening pattern to start their games!

  • Ladders from private groups should also be shown at ladders page. Currently /ladders has only the three sitewide ladders, so why not make it show all the ladders where i’m currently joined? Not only this helps by bringing group ladders more visible, it would help justify the high-value top-bar placement of ladders page, since (imo) having that link there between ‘tournaments’ and ‘groups’ is now just waste of space, due it’s lack of content.

I don’t really know if any of these would help to activate the groups at all, but ii hope thy would. ^___^
Also since all of those are just “small-ish tweaks” to take a better use of the current features, instead totally new ones, so implementing those should not be that hard :wink:

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Yes, they’re not in group chat because with every group they join, each individual group becomes less important. It’s just 1/n of the places you’re part of.

No feature in the world will change this. People’s attention is limited. The more important you and your place are to the people, the more time they will spend with you or at your place. The more people are actively involved, the easier it is to keep the group running, as members will tell each other about events. If you try to get people’s attention (new chat, new notifications, new feature x) but they’re not involved with the group, you’ll just get exodus.

Of course if only 1 person wants to make something happen and no one else cares… that group failed.

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