TCF Suggestion Find a way to bring back Social Groups, or a proper replacement for Social Groups

Murphmario

Retinazer
I get why Social Groups were removed in the first place, but honestly TCF (especially the RP section) hasn't been the same ever since they got removed. I'm pretty sure an addon exists out there to function like Social Groups formerly did; I'd be pretty happy if that was added onto TCF.
 
What exactly is wrong with the RP sections now that you think 'social groups' would fix?

TCF isn't meant to be a destination for RP; ir's just a diversion. There are dedicated RP sites that may better serve your interest in this area.
 
What exactly is wrong with the RP sections now that you think 'social groups' would fix?

TCF isn't meant to be a destination for RP; ir's just a diversion. There are dedicated RP sites that may better serve your interest in this area.
None of the other RP sites really have the same experience Social Groups did though, and are currently having problems in terms of RP longevity. Also, only two threads per RP, while not a huge restriction, doesn't compare to the larger number of Social Group threads that could be made. And there's also the other benefits Social Groups had outside of RPing, such as the groups for specific communities.

Edit: There's also a lot of people here that have fond memories of social groups, as well as several that left when Social Groups got taken away.
 
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Unfortunately, (and I think this was explained when they were removed) Social Groups were an extremely time intensive "home made" add-on that we created for the site. They were cobbled together from a variety of different pre-existing add-ons that we were not the creators of; none of us are "professional Xenforo add-on creators" as it is, so this was entirely premised on the idea of using these pre-build add-ons to make SGs work.

And then . . . as happens . . . the original creators stopped supporting them. And then they broke. Because when stuff isn't supported, new versions break it. We tried as hard as we could to find a workaround, and we delayed updating the forums for literal years in an attempt to keep it around and find a way out of the predicament, but unfortunately, it wasn't possible. There was no other replacement to those add-ons, and attempting to jury-rig a brand new "Social Groups" variation from other such add-ons would have taken a ton of time and luck to even get something resembling the original result.

And all for what? So that in a few years, those new add-ons would also become outdated, and we'd have to go through Social Groups dying a second time? Unfortunately, I feel as if that was the inevitable outcome, and if we had known that from the start, we may never have had SGs at all. I personally feel that having something and then taking it away is worse than never having it at all, and trying to add it back in the same way (and only lose it again in the future) would be refusing to learn from the previous situation.

To clarify again, the original SG add-on was not a simple one-and-done installation that worked flawlessly. Loki combined a variety of different functionalities to create the final result, and key add-ons in that creation ceased to function. And that we could see (as we spent over a year delaying the removal of SGs), there was no simple replacement add-on. Its possible something like that could come to exist again, but its a risky endeavor building a major functionality of the site around add-ons that we have no control over and no ability to fix.

Just my two cents, hope it sheds some light on why this isn't likely to be feasible.
 
I would estimate that 95% of the existing social groups (SGs) were dormant/dead for the 12 months prior to removing the feature. That include nearly 100% of the existing RP groups. That wasn't because they didn't work, they simply weren't being used.

Most of the RP activity of that time consisted of chat threads about how dead the RP section was (much like now). Then there a few knuckleheads who thought they were independent from the forum rules and moderation, and spent most of their time attacking the staff or harassing anyone who dared try to start an RP group without their blessing and oversight. We're not going back to that - good riddance to those who left (or were made to leave) over this.

If you can't keep interest in RP going with the current system, then you've said nothing so far that convinces me that a complex mechanism such as SGs is going to help you.

the groups for specific communities

There's only one community here - the Terraria community. That's why it's called 'Terraria Community Forums'.
 
I think I remember that Social Groups plugin. It broke on the Xenforo forum I was on as well, and we had some darn good Administrators taking care of the forum's needs at the time, and even they couldn't get it to work nicely with the forum software.

I really wish people knew just how utterly fragile forums are and how intensely difficult it is to maintain them and preserve any semblance of stability, if not just sheer functionality, while keeping the community afloat. So many times the forum staff rely on functionality that was written by third parties. Those plugins are usually paid plugins that don't always necessarily work well with other (usually paid) plugins. Heck, I remember showing a few very detailed and diligently reproducible bug reports to the AddOn developers that they weren't able to reproduce, likely because of the combination of AddOns we had at the time.

tl;dr - Please don't take the forum Administrators for granted. They work harder than you'll ever know to keep people happy and content, they (usually) don't get paid for it, and tend to only receive flak from people when things aren't beautiful and perfect, and almost no recognition when things are fine.
 
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