Any sort of club feature to be added in the future?

1st Official Post

    Hello it's me again! I am patiently waiting for the release of 6.0 to see if I make the leap! Right now I am using another software for my website, and this software has an amazing feature named "Clubs"!

    I'm sure you know of it, it basically adds user-configurable mini-communities within the community itself. With Woltlab's internationalization, I think it would be a really amazing feature to be added!

    I think I saw an extension on the filebase here that kinda does that, but something official could also be really cool! I know there must be other priorities right now, but having such a feature would definitely remove me some hustle because I'm terrible at making choices and on my current forum, it's really the only thing that makes it stand out compared to Woltlab, which is better in many other domains in my opinion...

    • Official Post

    Hello,

    We do not offer a feature that is comparable to the clubs and we have no plans to develop such a feature at this time. There is an existing third party plugin that achieves a similar functionality Clan Verwaltung: Foren 5.5 / 5.4 / 5.3.

    May I ask about your use case, in particular why there is a need for what are effectively user-created sub forums? How can that not be solved through the existing functionality?

    Thank you for your reply. I thought about using the default applications to create the various club-features instead, but I thought that having everything of one type at the same place is more handy!

    For example, a group for a specific political occupation, to share information, pictures etc, in a centralized and more "niche" manner. Of course I could already do that using separate forums, gallery categories/albums and a custom user group (with different levels of permissions) to "manage" these different features, but the thing missing is that regular users cannot create such permission groups.

    What I like with clubs is that I don't have to create a ton of different user groups per occupation or other interests. My community creates clubs that are invite only for example, for privacy purpose, and with woltlab I can somewhat do it with the user group application system that I really really like (and other softwares don't have), but it's limited to manual creation.

    • Official Post

    You’ve already discovered the moderated user groups which allow a group users to have some degree of autonomy. You are also correct that this still requires some preparations to be made by the administrator to set up their dedicated section.

    Allowing users to set up these areas entirely themselves has some appeal, but at the same time this creates an additional segmentation within a community. This requires a lot of effort to implement, because you not only require all the necessary tools to setup and manage these areas but also requires moderation capabilities to resolve any issues/complaints. Taking into consideration the vast amount of options that you have with forums alone is nothing to sneeze at and of course it doesn’t end with forums, there are other parts of the software that should also be included.

    It’s undeniable that there is a use case for a “clubs” like feature, but quite frankly the efforts to design, implement and maintain such a solution in the long run outweighs the potential gains. The impact on our customer base is too low to justify the significant amount of resources required to make this happen.

    That said: If this is an essential feature for you then you might want to take a look at Clan Verwaltung: Foren 5.5 / 5.4 / 5.3 which is quite similar. Otherwise my honest recommendation is to look elsewhere, because such a feature is not on our roadmap.

    Thank you for your reply! It's completely understandable with the amount of work it would require to maintain it with all the other apps. I'll think about the ups and downs of it and make a decision.

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