Hi, I’m a clanner, a leader, and a lot of my time on ROBLOX has been dependent on groups and the existence of clans, for many people this is one of the major reasons they play ROBLOX, is the immersion into groups, factions, and other areas for users to group together and have fun in organisation.
This is a long post, I have a lot of stuff to cover that I believe should be considered, so let me know what you think, and if you manage to read through it all. and of course an official ROBLOX response would be greatly appreciated.
Over the past few years, the groups interface for your profile has seen little major updates, several years ago the groups interface was updated to include the button-based scrolling on the side, to allow members to scroll through all of their groups, is one major example.
A lot of these updates were helpful, but I believe that the group interface in its current age is in desperate need of a new, unique intuitive interface that works more efficiently and has added features.
The following are some fixes that I believe could be made to the current system and how it works:
-The button-based group scrolling on the left side of the screen
This feature could obviously be better, at the moment it only shows 10 groups, and the only way to scroll through it is by clicking the buttons, this is something that is difficult for OBC users to search through all of their groups, I have been in 100 groups before as an OBC member, and I can vouch it was absolute hell.
At the moment, it displays 10 groups, and clearly if you look at a group wall as you scroll down you’ll see there’s lots of blank space under the groups where more could be displayed to have it all on the page at one time, this could be a viable alternative, or even by stretching it to display 20, or even 30 icons instead of 10.
-The administrative interface
For group owners, the administrative interface for rank management, group description and logo uploading, settings and other tabs are very important to a groups looks and well being. For the moment, for some systems people have had problems using these webpages, sometimes navigating through peoples ranks can prompt errors, and prevent changed from being made, this is a specific issue that hasn’t been investigated, and still happens to this day.
Another pet-peeve of mine is the group description window, all users who have access to the admin panel interface will have a “Save” button under the group description update box. Unfortunately, only the owner can actually use the save button.
-Allies on the Admin panel
When the owner or a group leader sends another group an ally request, it will prompt a small amount of text saying “an ally request has been sent”. And that’s it, if the page is refreshed or navigated away from, there is no history of an ally request being sent, and it will not be known if it’s accepted or declined until it magically appears in the allies tab. Some form of update could include a small window for “Pending ally requests”, and “Recently accepted/rejected ally requests”.
-Personal Servers / Group Games on the group
This is a very large issue for me, and it’s more personal on my account too.
There are two ways to have your place display under a group page, either by listing it as a group personal server, which can be done by making a place a personal server, and assigning it to the group (and then setting it back to a game place to remove the saving features.), Or, making it a game place, by uploading the game directly to the group, giving only authorized members access to it (or none, if the group owner makes it so).
As personal build servers are expected to be removed, I’d like to see an equivalent way to put games that are uploaded to user profiles on to a group place, the personal server method often sees the places removed on random occassions, requiring the process to be done over again.
I don’t like uploading places as group games because of Security. A while back my account was terminated and locked, this put the group up for free, allowing anyone with BC to take it. Sure enough, someone did, all the money was taken from it, and if I had uploaded group games, all of the games would have been taken too, putting our exclusive places and technology up for practically everyone to take. My termination was lifted soon later by appeal for a misunderstanding, and the group was recovered.
This is my main list for updates of CURRENT features, Next, i’ll go on to NEW features.
Helpful new features:
Lately, groups have seen very little new features since the site was rebuilt in design several years ago, for the most part they’ve been the same aside from the group revenue tab and ability to upload group clothes, and upgraded maximum limit to 20 rolesets instead of 10.
Some new features to the interface would be extremely helpful, and maybe if some of these features were toggle-able by the owner that would keep group privacy in mind too.
-Group Feed
A new group feed display to the side of the webpage would be a great addition, as of current technology most gamers use widescreen monitors, and because of this, a lot of space on the groups tab has been left empty, this leaves room for additions and expansion that could prove helpful.
A group feed would display recent group shouts, and would contain a history of group shouts, to give any group member an idea of how active a group is and how often they have activities and events, and of course acting as a sort of log too.
Ofcourse, this feature should be toggle-able, as currently the only way to view previous group shouts is through the audit log, and a group feed should be no alternative to bypass the need for authorization.
-Pinning posts
The ability to pin wall posts would be extremely useful for group leaders, a pinned wall post can be pinned at the top of the wall, or on the side, so that any users reading the wall would see the pinned post first, this post could be something important the owner didn’t want to get lost in a massive wall conversation.
-Subgroups / divisions
While this is more of a luxury than a extremely-needed update, this would prove to be something popular in use and helpful for group organization.
The ability to create subgroups, that would all either display on a groups tab or as miniature logos under the main groups logo, subgroups would allow for further organization, especially for military-type group organisations who divide their groups into divisions. These divisions may contain a set of special rolesets or statuses that could be referenced with API services, this would reduce the need for group owners to create multiple groups, with different groupID’s to run off of, adding each other as allies to be divisions and such. Of course, a subgroup feature would still be a premium feature, it could cost 75 robux (or 100, as normal groups do, for all I care) swell as special roleset ID’s.
-Clear group shout button
Currently, the only way to remove a group shout and make it appear is totally blank and invisible is by inserting a space and pressing enter, this will enter a blank text that will then remove the display from the website page.
If you don’t type in a space, it will shout “Enter group shout”, as this is the underlying grey text before you type a new shout
Here’s a little picture I decided to put together that includes a couple of these updates and what they might look like:
For the moment, this is all I can think of, I’ve sat here for the past 2 hours thinking of new useful features that could be helpful. Let me know what you guys think, obviously some of these updates might be intrusive, annoying or un-pleasant, as always post what you think or how it could be improved.
- Yes, I concur with most of these updates
- No, Most of these updates are unnecessary and intrusive.
0 voters
