Group announcements feature

I'd like to suggest a funtion to allow announcements to be made to a group.

At the moment the only two methods to communicate with an entire group are to send a group IM or to propose a vote. Both of which lead to spam as any member can do either and the "propose a vote" method is really subverting the real purpose of that feature.

What I suggest is another tab on the group details called announcements. This page would be like the voting page with recent announcements listed. There would also be a button for the use of group officers to create a new announcement.

When an announcement is created, online players would get a popup dialog saying there's a new announcement (or several announcements) and a button to go to bring up the group window and announcements page, offline members would get the dialog when they log in (as happens with the voting dialogs now).

I'm pretty sure this would be warmly received by other group officers, it's something I'd love to see if only to save clicking through all the voting dialogs that pop up when I log in.

Good idea. We'll add this idea to those we're looking at for improved group features. Maybe start a discussion to see if there are other group communication tools that would be helpful. I'll copy this thread to the Feature Suggestions forum for more feedback.

Also to send email to all group members? I have to send a notecard soon too all 100 members to my group.. Will take me all day *sighs*

I like the group announcements idea. Having a group forum is ok, but it's not a reliable way to ensure all members receive the communication.

Also, I'd like to see...

1) IM all officers/members of a group, even if they are offline.

2) Drag items from my inventory to a group and have a copy delivered to all members, even if they are offline. Yes, this would only work on items I had copy and transfer permissions on.

3) This might be an easy way to integrate these features: With the advent of the friends/CC distinction in 1.6, we could have automatically generated folders that have the CCs of all members of groups you belong to. You wouldn't be able to add or remove cards in the folder, but in all other ways they would behave like a folder of CCs. Each group folder would go in a folder called "Groups" that was either a sibling or child of "Calling Cards" (I can see a case made for each place).