Dr. Lecter
Contributor
I have spent some time gathering data about the usage of groups to see how much effort we need to make to try to accommodate active groups that were displaced by the loss of that feature. For the vast majority of groups, there were almost no members in the groups, but for a good number there were in fact a bunch of members but almost no discussion. Very few groups--even the populated ones--had any activity at all over the past 6-9 months, so Groups was clearly not ever a very popular feature. The upshot is that since the feature was barely used at all, there's not a lot of pressure to replicate it elsewhere on the board. Right now we are looking at the possibility of creating smaller regional subgroups within the larger regional forums, but there has to be a demonstrated interest amongst the subgroup for it to happen, both in terms of numbers of members and posting history of the old groups. South Africa, for example may form a subforum within the larger Africa regional forum, and that will be a test case. There will be no private, by-invitation-only subforums. They may be closed to posting for those not specifically registered for that forum, but they will not be invisible or private.
Our suggestion for your case, crhpai, is a regular thread in a regular discussion forum, but it's hard to say whether that will meet your needs since I have no way of learning what it was you guys were talking about in your private group.
It sounds like the forum software that drives SB, rather than SB itself, updated to remove the Groups feature without any SB input/request...is that right? Any idea why your software provider would remove a feature from its platform without any request or warning? Seems strange, but I'm not sure what support had to be dedicated to maintaining the software feature on their end.