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.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Why not post this on vB.com where a developer might actually read it?

[MrEyes]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

Why not post this on vB.com where a developer might actually read it?

It has

I am curious about other administrators opinions and whether I am on my own

[punchbowl]

They should just copy the 'social forums' mod from here. It's a joke as is.

[MrEyes]

Originally Posted by punchbowl

They should just copy the 'social forums' mod from here. It's a joke as is.

I was using that mod until I upgraded to 3.8. That mod is excellent and makes social discussions what IMHO they should be, feature rich and consistent with existing functionality. In other words it gives users what they expect to see.

When I upgraded I thought long and hard about what I should do, keep the mod or revert to the vb offering, in the end I chose the latter.

Considering the rambling above this probably seems like a contradictory and crazy decision. My reasoning was that vBulletin are constantly tinkering with Social Groups and giving out very little information on where they are going with it, and I have some faith that they will eventually get it right. In addition to this right now there is a mod that will take threads/posts from the Social Forums mod and put them into the vBulletin system. However X versions from now, when VB get their act together, this migration mod/tool might not be available/compatible and I could find myself in a position where I am unable migrate the existing Social Forums.

As I said to my members when the upgrade was done, keeping the mod would in the short term solve all the issues. However in the long term keeping the mod might create much more complex issues. This isn't the fault of the excellent Social Forums mod, this blame here IMHO lies firmly with vBulletin and their apparent lack on thought on the implementation of Social Group Discussions.

[punchbowl]

It's the reason I haven't upgraded. One of my most popular sub-forums is a social forum. Before social forums my users just posted pointless remarks for the novelty value. Same with visitor messages in the main too.

[Reeve of shinra]

I thought the point of object oriented code was its reusability? It would make sense then that all the development that went into Forum Threads and Posts would have been reused for Group Threads and Posts.

I am sure there is some technical reason why it could not be reused and I think a lot of people were hoping the vb4 rewrite would resolve that.

[Hoffi]

Yes. We miss also some of this Thing. The Message-Counter and many other Things.
I don't know why they did not adapt the Forum System insted of writing a new System.
I also hope that vB4 do this much better.

[musicdiscussion]

It needs more intregration into the forum pages. For members to see the social groups, they either have to visit their profile or click on some long winded links.

I would like to see random or latest social groups listing on the forum itself.

[NashChristian]

What is the status of this? Is any of this being implemented or improved in vB4? Will there be stickies and subcategories in social groups? That would really be useful to me!

Thanks.