Social Groups for XenForo [Paid] [Deleted]

[Rigel Kentaurus]

When I moved to XenForo, I was really sad to leave behind the groups functionality. With more than 5,000 groups created, and 2,000,000 messages on it, it proved to be a valuable asset to my community. I used the groups to banish all those offtopic and playful threads and keep the forum serious, people use it to organize small events for which I would not create a forum, and fans talked about their favorite shows in a forum that had no room for a sitcoms category.

So, I embarked on the quest of making a drop-in replacement for Social Groups, something that is not quite the functionality of the forums, but still has groups, threads, members. After a while, I am done.

I bring you: Social Groups. Some features:

• Members can choose to create a group in any of the admin-configured categories
• Members can create either public groups, moderated groups, or invite-only groups
• Privacy options to set your memberlist, threads, posts or whole group private
• Multiple leaders (owners) per group, group can be transferred
• Members can start threads in a group. A thread can have any amount of messages.
• Group leaders can customize their group with color, an icon, and a group page
• Integrated into the XenForo experience (News Feed, Alerts)
• vBulletin social groups importer included

I am making this available for $40. I am using it on my site and not a week from released I have a huge list of feature requests. I am sure you will have your own suggestions. I will provide updates for one year which will give you access to any changes I do.

You can see the demo site, here: http://xfaddons.com



.

 

[Lykke]

Great! The group feature is something I've been waiting for too =)

 

[SchmitzIT]

This looks excellent. Cannot wait to give that a try.

 

[Eagle]

Looks great thank you but I didn't see anything member profile blocks with your screenshots? So why you were late to do? :/ if you have a demo, so we can really use the test sites for testing. We really heard the need this product before moving to XenForo.

 

[Rodrigo Farcas]

Great Addition... Can you add a block for @xfrocks widget's framework?

 

[Rodrigo Farcas]

When I moved to XenForo, I was really sad to leave behind the groups functionality. With more than 5,000 groups created, and 2,000,000 messages on it, it proved to be a valuable asset to my community. I used the groups to banish all those offtopic and playful threads and keep the forum serious, people use it to organize small events for which I would not create a forum, and fans talked about their favorite shows in a forum that had no room for a sitcoms category.

So, I embarked on the quest of making a drop-in replacement for Social Groups, something that is not quite the functionality of the forums, but still has groups, threads, members. After a while, I am done.

I bring you: Social Groups. Some features:

• Members can choose to create a group in any of the admin-configured categories
• Members can create either public groups, or moderated groups
• Multiple leaders (owners) per group, group can be transfered
• Members can start threads in a group. A thread can have any amount of messages.
• Group leaders can customize their group with color, an icon, and a group page
• Integrated into the XenForo experience (News Feed, Alerts)

I am making this available for $40. I am using it on my site and not a week from released I have a huge list of feature requests. I am sure you will have your own suggestions. I will provide updates for one year which will give you access to any changes I do.


vBulletin importer? Of course. But I'll release it separately, while it works now (I imported MY vBulletin groups with it, including all threads and posts, it is not ready for prime time and I am sure it would annoy any non-technical user), I will release it later this week.

You can buy it here: http://pul.ly/b/27453

Do you have a working demo?

 

[Digital Doctor]

Looks Great. Rigel always makes good stuff.
Love the Alerts.


Ideas:
Change nothing it is great as it is ...
Group Announcements thread (which people joining are auto watching by default).
Wiki Pages
Group articles ?
Group Landing URL can be a Page vs. List of thread topics.
Group Albums / Gallery
XenPorta widget for List of Groups.
New Groups are added to a "New Group Announcement thread" in the forums, for those interested in hearing about new groups created. (or maybe New Groups this week thread).
Notices for groups
Custom Styling per Group ?
Group Trophies awarded manually by Founders.

 

[Morgain]

Is this purely for VB import or is it a standalone XF addon?

How do the group memberlists work? Are they on a tab?
Can other members see who is on a Group list? Does it show members data (userblurb)?

Can the admin assign users/ usergroups to a Group?

Does the group have its own page as a base? Can this be private to them?

Oh and can the term Group be changed in Phrases?

 

[Digital Doctor]

Is this purely for VB import or is it a standalone XF addon?

It has been released before the importer ... so ... it must not require it.

How do the group memberlists work? Are they on a tab?
Can other members see who is on a Group list? Does it show members data (userblurb)?

Click on Members of Group to bring up Popup.

 

[ArnyVee]

I was just about to start a thread (or search for an existing one) regarding the implementation of social groups for xF!

Gotta try this one out

 

[Matthew2D]

Holy s***! This is amazing! I thought this would never be made! Is there a demo?

 

[Morgain]

I've been analysing the difference between Social Groups and Circles with great care.
If I have anything wrong please correct me.

The major difference is that
Social Groups supports users creating their own groups whenever they want, and customising as they wish.

Circles supports the Admin (or Admin and mods) assigning membership,OR the user opts in (link at top of Circle forum like Watching a forum). The user cannot Create. Users can request a Circle set up from Admin/ Mods. which is easily done as it is just Creating a new forum. Ditto customisation of colours, page title graphic.
Because Circles are enriched forums they have all forum services: Moderators, integration, privacy permissions, Alerts, Trophies etc. There is no separate directory or separate navigation as this is the normal node tree.

Social Groups membership list is popup off the navbar? which is very convenient.
Circle membership list is on the Circle forum/ or Category page with Start Convo links to promote personal relationships. There is also a small Circle Library for links and resources, which can integrate with the sitewide Main Library / Directory - another mod for Articles with bbcode).

Circles does not currently support VB import unless VB Groups has integrated with forums?

 

[Trekkan]

As Circles is a mod only you have (as far as I know?) Maybe it would be best to compare the features with the author of that mod since the rest of the group (anyone reading this) can't really participate.

 

[Eagle]

Still unfortunately there is no demo yet. Has anyone actually installed this product successfully?

 

[3c]

Interesting. I'll be watching the development of both this and circles, although as it stands now I think Circles is closer to what I would want to implement...curious to see where they both go.

 

[DRE]

Oh great. I deleted our vb4 groups when I switched over to Xenforo. Wish I had saved them...

 

[SchmitzIT]

The circles would be what I used to use for private forums for members. That also does sound interesting, I have to add. Though the two might have different uses altogether. Social groups as an open means for people to connect, and circles for a private way.

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

I still don't have a public demo available. Since it has been requested several times (I would have requested it myself), I would make one available later this week. I kind of have to install a new XenForo if I want to do that.

I do have it live in my site, though, http://cemzoo.com/index.php?cz-groups/groups-list&category_id=6 althought I won't encourage anyone to anything other than browsing, as I don't want to end with dummy test groups on a production site (plus it's in Spanish)

Looks great thank you but I didn't see anything member profile blocks with your screenshots? So why you were late to do? :/ if you have a demo, so we can really use the test sites for testing. We really heard the need this product before moving to XenForo.

Oh, I guess I missed to showcase that feature, if you go to the profile of any user, it shows a list of all the groups he belongs to.

Great Addition... Can you add a block for @xfrocks widget's framework?

I think that will come in time. Right now people are just getting engaged with the addon and I might be missing functionality that while it's fine for me, people would consider it "core", and I want to help them have it. I will help with integration with other hacks further down the road (I'm thinking the widget and whatever XenPorta uses). Of course the authors of those hacks are welcome to do their own integration and save me the trouble.

Looks Great. Rigel always makes good stuff.
Love the Alerts.

View attachment 23952
Ideas:
Change nothing it is great as it is ...
Group Announcements thread (which people joining are auto watching by default).
Wiki Pages
Group articles ?
Group Landing URL can be a Page vs. List of thread topics.
Group Albums / Gallery
XenPorta widget for List of Groups.
New Groups are added to a "New Group Announcement thread" in the forums, for those interested in hearing about new groups created. (or maybe New Groups this week thread).
Notices for groups
Custom Styling per Group ?
Group Trophies awarded manually by Founders.

Thanks for your ideas. Most appreciated. I hope you don't mind if I steal some of them for future development. I love the trophies one. And the albums is in high request from my members (which are mad enough they lost their own albums)

Is this purely for VB import or is it a standalone XF addon?

How do the group memberlists work? Are they on a tab?
Can other members see who is on a Group list? Does it show members data (userblurb)?

Can the admin assign users/ usergroups to a Group?

Does the group have its own page as a base? Can this be private to them?

Oh and can the term Group be changed in Phrases?

1. This is a Standalone, the only reason that I mentioned the importer is because people might be moving from vBulletin social groups and I wanted to let them know an imported is already written and will be available

2. The group memberlist is on an overlay. It can open on a new page if it needes to. It does not have fancy features, it just shows all the members in the group

3. Everybody can see who else is in the group, and who owns the group, and the threads

4. The admin cannot sign the users. The users have to either go and sign-in themselves (if the group is public), or apply for the group (if it is moderated) and be approved by one of the group leaders. The admin is completely out of the loop unless he happens to be the group leader. Groups are supposed to be user-led.

5. The group has a main page, and the users can use rich text and whatever they can do with BBCode in the description for creating their "Front Page". Though the group cannot really be completely private that is in my feature list and I will most likely add that sometime in the future, most likely as a usergroup-earned privilege so people can offer that to their members.

6. The add-on is fully localized, if you wish to change "Group" to "Meetup" or anything else you can fully do through the phrase system

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

I've been analysing the difference between Social Groups and Circles with great care.
If I have anything wrong please correct me.

The major difference is that
Social Groups supports users creating their own groups whenever they want, and customising as they wish.

Circles supports the Admin (or Admin and mods) assigning membership,OR the user opts in (link at top of Circle forum like Watching a forum). The user cannot Create. Users can request a Circle set up from Admin/ Mods. which is easily done as it is just Creating a new forum. Ditto customisation of colours, page title graphic.
Because Circles are enriched forums they have all forum services: Moderators, integration, privacy permissions, Alerts, Trophies etc. There is no separate directory or separate navigation as this is the normal node tree.

Social Groups membership list is popup off the navbar? which is very convenient.
Circle membership list is on the Circle forum/ or Category page with Start Convo links to promote personal relationships. There is also a small Circle Library for links and resources, which can integrate with the sitewide Main Library / Directory - another mod for Articles with bbcode).

Circles does not currently support VB import unless VB Groups has integrated with forums?

If you have a link for this circles add-on, I will be more than glad to check it out, at this point, I don't think I know that add-on, was this privately coded for your use?

Social Groups indeed have their own threads and post functionality. That is intended and by design. While it is convenient to just create a forum and have it private to the group, my experience is that it will degrade performance. You don't want to make it slow for the members browsing the forums because there are thousands of groups, maintenance becomes a real nightmare and I really didn't want to go that route.

You can read in here that Mike mentions that a practical limit to forums is 1000, http://xenforo.com/community/threads/theoretical-limit-to-nodes.13145/ my forum so far has ~5000 groups, and giving each of them a forum would be an overkill.

Oh great. I deleted our vb4 groups when I switched over to Xenforo. Wish I had saved them...

If you have a copy of your old database, you might be able to import them

 

[Morgain]

The circles would be what I used to use for private forums for members. That also does sound interesting, I have to add. Though the two might have different uses altogether. Social groups as an open means for people to connect, and circles for a private way.

Schmitz I have the same approach as you. I want to see what each addon can do because they overlap but they are also very different.
It also needs to be explored whether they could both be used on one site. I would go for one or the other myself, but forum addons are all about choices I think.

Contrary to your guess Circles can be any degree of private or public, subject to the minimum of registered members. They are essentially enriched forums (or Categories) so permissions can be set any way you wish, except open join to unregistered.
A member can join if the Circle is within their node / usergroup permissions. A user can have a special join outside their usergroup Etc

Social Groups major contribution (as a comparison) is user led creation and customisation of Groups. With the right culture of support so people know how to maintain their groups, this can be very exciting. Secondly they create extra independent Group zones, which some will find an unwanted complexity, but others will decide it is a rich expansion on their existing landscape. There's also the VB import issue to consider which is essential to so many.
Rigel also posted above a big issue which is that Social Groups can service a big big complicated community. Circles is not designed for that it's a clan focus.

Circles keep their groups within admin and moderator control, starting and customising by user request. For some boards that would be a frustrating restriction, but to others it avoids dead groups and sustains focus. There are no extra areas as the node tree, and forum/ or Category pages are already there and they expand to become the Circles if enabled to do so). The integration with the Library (articles) gives Circles their very different direction to go.

I think both have value in different ways and offer a really exciting set of possibilities.