Update your settings

Hey everyone, quick heads up about some group changes

We’ve officially upgraded to a brand new groups system. While this is great news overall, it does mean we need your help to transition things smoothly.

The old groups plugin was built by a previous developer and, unfortunately, has a lot of issues under the hood. Some groups already started showing bugs like background image problems and strange loading behavior. After looking into it, we realized it just isn’t safe to move anything over from that system without risking broken data or losing it completely.

Because of that, anyone who owns a group will need to remake it in the new system. We know this isn’t ideal, but the good news is that this new plugin gives us way more flexibility and features.

Right now at the top of the site, you’ll see two Groups tabs:

• Groups – Please move your groups here (this is the new one)

• Groups – Will be deleted (this is the old one)

Please make sure you’re creating and joining groups in the new section. The old groups won’t be removed right away. We’ll keep them up for at least a week so you have time to copy anything important over.

Here’s what’s new with the updated groups:

You’ll be able to:

• Create sub-groups (mini groups inside a main one)

• Link related groups and cross-post between them

• Assign custom titles or ranks to your members

• Use CSS in your groups to customize how they look

• Set improved privacy settings, especially helpful for writers

• Have your group’s activity show up in your home feed if you're a member

• Use group polls, comment approval tools, and group team pages (similar to the staff page)

• Customize your group URLs to make them cleaner and easier to share

We’re also looking into enabling video and photo uploads inside groups, but this might be restricted to certain member levels depending on how much server space it ends up using. We’ll share more on that soon.

Just a heads up, the new "Groups" plugin is still being set up. Right now, there are no custom layouts or coding applied to it yet, so things might look a little plain. Everything was kind of dropped in as-is, but we expect things to start looking much more polished by the middle of next week.

Thanks for your patience while we get everything updated. If you run a group, feel free to start moving things over now. Let us know if you run into any issues or need help along the way.

More updates coming soon!