Groups within Groups

[Joris Kröner]

My client is adamant that she wants groups within groups as she feels it will be too cluttered. 

As this is currently not possible in Ning can other NC's give pointers how to structure this any other way? 

Otherwise I need to give a good motivation why having "many" groups is a good thing...

Thanks in advance,

Joris

[Sean Herman]

I can't possibly see why this would be necessary. I would just suggest the user make a different discussion for each topic...what are her plans with the group?

[Joris Kröner]

We want to run with run with 3 main Groups: Fitness, Wellness and Medical. These should be visible on the Home Page an with these 3 Groups are a myriad of Groups relating to that channel. Creates cleaner interface and is more user friendly experience.

If we have 100+ groups in one year this will look very cluttered and users will need to screen all the groups to select the relevant group. I am surprised Ning has not responded to this request as there have been queries dating back to 2009.

[Sean Herman]

I see now what you are getting at. I thought it would be a good idea to have multiple forums (a board or sub-forum within the main one), which I guess is similar to what you ware wanting to do. I posted a discussion bout it a few hours ago, only to find out Nnig does not offer this capability to any of its users. I was surprised by it too. I wish there was another way round it.

[Joris Kröner]

Thanks for your time and feedback Sean, appreciated!

[Alessandro Sporleder]

What I've done in my network maybe an alternative for what you are trying to create, let me explain:

I created until now about 650 groups and I'm still creating more to reach about 2000. In my network each group is a beer brand from the world, and the idea is that when a user joins a group, actually is putting that beer in his collection because he has already tasted it.

As there's no subgroup feature, I created a page with the countries, those are not groups, just links. In your network could be a page with 3 images/texts: Fitness, Wellness and Medical.

This is the page of countries: http://www.lokobeer.com/page/wiki-da-cerveja

When the user clicks on a flag of a country it's a link to the groups filtered with that location, see this example: http://www.lokobeer.com/groups/group/listByLocation?location=Brasil

In each group I create, the field "Location" is filled with a country to match the search explained above.

Another think I do is to use tags in the text description of a group, then I have another category to work with, and I put it as a link for the user naming it a tag. Below is an example, I'm not a html expert then there could be a better code for it... 

<em>tags: <a href="http://www.lokobeer.com/groups/group/search?q=have+a+nice+beer" target="_self">Have a Nice Beer</a></em></p><p><meta name="keywords" content="Have a Nice Beer"></p>

Then I can use the link http://www.lokobeer.com/groups/group/search?q=have+a+nice+beer to filter the groups in that category.

[Eric Suesz]

I definitely would try to convince your client to not go crazy with groups at first. From my experience, Network Creators sometimes go group crazy at first and then all of those groups don't grow organically.

It's hard to predict how people will act online, so sometimes you have to wait and see. Grow slowly and tailor the organization and classification of the content based on how the community is using the tool, as opposed to setting up a rigid system of classification ahead of time that covers all potentialities. That's just my opinion. When I hear that they are expecting to create 100 groups in the first year, my mind kind of boggles. I just don't know if that expectation will be borne out (or if it should be). 

I think that maybe what you want are categories for groups. We don't offer that at this point, but maybe that is an idea that would work. 

[Joris Kröner]

Thanks for the advice Eric!

[JFarrow]

 consider this:   on my site I have groups based on location.  with that said, I have all 50 states, all 7 continents and over 1 hundred countries.  I do it like this. Take for example Land Surveyors of Ghana group which is a subgroup of Land Surveyors of Africa which futher specifies the types of discussions in each group.

however I agree with Eric, in that you shouldn't think of groups as "if you build it they will come" because without a clear idea and clever hierarchy of groups, it will just be confusing to members...

one final note is you should think of groups not as groups but as "group forums" because in all actuality, thats what they are...hope this helps    add /forum  to the end of any group name URL and you'll see what I mean

[Joris Kröner]

Thanks for the pointers!