Private Group Forums

It seems to me that private forums for groups would be very useful.

The ResMods have a private forum, and it's part of the vBulletin system used in all the rest of the forums, so I don't think this would be much of a technical challenge.

It seems to me this would be very useful for businesses, community organizations, and the like.

The Scripting Library forum is set up such that posts don't appear until they have been reviewed by the forum moderator.

I think it would be useful for group forums to be enabled to operate in this fashion.

I'm not sure, but I don't think this would require anything beyond a change in policy.

I think this would make the group forums much more useful.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of groups in Second Life. Do you propose every group has a chance to have a forum, or just the largest ones?

I think this would create more trouble than benefit. After all, there are many other options out there - invite-only Yahoo Groups being one that immediately springs to mind - that people could utilise if they really really had to have their own forum to discuss group events.

Sorry. I just don't see any "positives" out of this.

Lewis

Every group that has twenty members at the time of the request for group forum creation already has the chance to have a forum created. My suggestion as stated in the initial post does not involve any change to that policy.

My suggestion is that it be possible to designate a group forum private, not visible to those outside of the group.

If this increased the formation and use of group forums this would be sign that the private group forums are more desirable and useful than the existing group forums which are publicly viewable and can be posted in by non-group members.

Group forums time out after a period of non-use. Since the private forums would get no use except by members of the group that had it turned private, it would time out quicker than open forums that have their timeout counter restarted bysometimes irrelevant posts from outsiders.

Suppose there was a group called Second Life Christians that wanted to start a group forum here. They can already do that, they just have to have twenty people in the group and pick two moderators and send a request to [email]groups@secondlife.com[/email]. As configured at present, anti-Christians would have access not only to read the forum but to make disruptive posts. My suggestion would enable them to have their religious discussion in peace.

Of couse there are other places one can start a forum. Those forums don't get listed on the Group Forums page on the SL website as SL group forums do.

What are the troubles you think would be uniquely produced by private group forums as distinct from open view and open post group forums such as exist at present?