Social Groups - A rush job

[MrEyes]

Is it just me or does the "new" Social Group framework in vBulletin seem to be somewhat rushed and badly thought out?

Brain dump rambling to follow, feel free to ignore :

vBulletin is obviously historically and primarily forum software but like any product it needs to remain fresh by adding to and enhancing existing functionality. Over the years we have seen many changes and most of these have been driven by what end users want/expect to see. This is more than apparent when we look at the recent addition of Social Groups & Albums. Both of which obviously have their roots in the "facebook" wave, or maybe tsunami?

Social Groups is a fantastic addition, and goes some way towards providing the functionality end users expect to see in an on-line community. However the current implementation of Social Groups seems to have forgotten about vBulletins roots and what its existing users expect from a vBulletin powered community and more importantly the framework seems to be rushed and poorly thought out.

As an example vBulletin seem to have developed an entirely independent discussion system for social groups. A system that lacks the features that users expect to see from a vBulletin powered site. As a site administrator I receive quite a few comments/questions asking why they cannot use attachments, quotes, ratings etc etc. In addition to these user experience problems as an administrator (or group owner/creator) I cannot create social group notices or control the group types that can be created. Maybe I have missed something but it seems crazy to ground up develop a social discussion system when vBulletin already has a highly polished and well tested discussion system in its forums.

As another example of something seemingly obvious but has been missed. On my site I have gone to some lengths to promote social groups as these mitigate requests for "can we have an <insert random subject not related to the site> forum". So now I have a lively social system with 15+ groups with hundreds of discussions and thousands of messages. However none of this activity is reflected on publicly visible site statistics (like threads/posts count and blogs (if you have vbblog installed)). This means that there is a whole world of activity on the site that new users do not necessarily know about.

So I suppose what I am saying here is that Social Groups should stay, but vBulletin designers/developers need to go back to square one and really think about what users/administrators want/need and then integrating this properly into the software.