Introducing Clubs!

[Sitting-Duc]

Hi all!

In the next major update of the website that will be coming this summer the platform developers are introducing a feature called 'clubs'. I think this is going to be an exciting and fascinating feature for us to adopt as it looks to help support a wider variety of games and sub-communities. The idea behind it will be that we create a 'club' for each of the game types we support with servers and also the games that we don't.The core parts to the community would stay as is such as general discussion/clan members/admin forums. 

These clubs will be available for anyone to join and are essentially micro communities within the site. Each micro community will have it's own 'homepage', 'forums'. 'downloads', 'events' and 'gallery'. The hope will be that with this organisational structure there will be more freedom for the games to have an identity of there own and also for users to have more choice in the content they are shown on the website. The events is something I am really looking forward to using as each game club can have a proper events system for tourneys etc. 

So that's about it with the update from me, I would love it if you would read the following update from the platform the developers and gave your feedback of what we could do with it: 

Quote

This entry is about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release.

We are happy to introduce the next major feature that will be available in IPS Community Suite 4.2 - Clubs.

Clubs are a brand new way of supporting sub-communities within your site. Many people have requested social group functionality in the past and Clubs are our implementation of this concept. Let's take a look at a few screenshots, and then go over what they are capable of doing.

The Club directory

A Club homepage

Club member listing

Example of content within a club (topics, in this case)

There's a lot to digest there! Let's go over the basic functionality.

 

Club Types

Four types of club are available:

• Public clubs
  Clubs that anyone can see and participate in without joining.
• Open club
  Clubs that anyone can see and join.
• Closed club
  Clubs that anyone can see in the directory, but joining must be approved by a Club Leader or Club Moderator. Non-club-members who view the club will only see the member list - not the recent activity or content areas.
• Private club
  Clubs that do not show in public, and users must be invited by a Club Leader or Club Moderator

As the site admin, you can of course configure which club types can be created and by whom. You could, for example, allow members to create public and open clubs, but allow a "VIP" group to also create Closed and Private clubs.

Admin configuration option for Club creations

 

Club Users

Each club has three levels of user:

• Leader
  A leader has all of the permissions of a moderator, and can add other moderators. They can also add content areas (see below). The club owner is automatically a leader.
• Moderators
  Moderators, as the name implies, have the ability to moderate content posted within the club. As the site administrator, you can define which moderator tools can be used. You could, for example, prevent any content being deleted from clubs, but allow it to be hidden. Moderators can also remove members from a club.
• Users
  Anyone else that joins the club.

Defining the moderator permissions available to club moderators

Your site administrator and moderators, with the appropriate permissions, are able to moderator content in any Club regardless of whether they are a member of it. 

Clubs can be created by any user who has permission. As you would expect, this is controlled by our regular permission settings.

For closed clubs, there's an approval process. Users can request to join and the request must be approved by a leader. Leaders get a notification when a user requests to join; the user gets a notification when their request is approved or denied.

Approving and declining join requests

 

Club Content

Club Leaders can add a variety of content areas to their club - forums, calendars, blogs and so on. It's important to note that these content areas are fully functional just as if they existed as a top-level admin created area. They will appear in search results, activity streams, users can follow them, embed links to them, and so on. If a user has permission to see a forum (for example) within a club it will behave exactly like other forums they see - and the same for all other kinds of content.

Each content area a leader adds can have a custom title, and will appear in the club navigation. This means, for example, that you can have multiple forums within a club, and give each a different name.

Adding content areas to a club

 

Club Custom Fields

Clubs also support custom fields. Custom fields are defined by the site administrator and can be filled in by Club Owners. The values they enter are shown (along with the club description) on the club homepage.

Custom fields in a club

On the Club Directory page, users can filter by the custom club fields.

Filtering clubs

 

Club Locations

Clubs have built-in support for Google Maps, allowing users to specify a physical location for their club. Let's say you run a community for car enthusiasts; each club might be tied to a particular region's meetup. The Club Owner specifies the location when setting up the club, and clubs are then shown on map on the directory page:

Club locations

And within a club, the location is shown too:

 

Club Display

We offer two ways to display club headers within the club - the standard way, shown in the screenshots you've seen up to this point, but we also have a sidebar option. This is something the admin sets globally for the site, rather than per-club. This is useful where your site design doesn't facilitate another horizontal banner taking up valuable screen real-estate; moving the club banner to the sidebar alleviates this pressure on vertical space.

Sidebar club style

Using Clubs in Other Ways

There's a lot of scope for using clubs beyond allowing users to create their own groups. You do not even have to call them "clubs" if that does not suit your use case. For example, on a company intranet you could rename Clubs to "Departments", and create a private group for each of your main roles. This would allow each department to have its own community, with its own forums, gallery, file sharing and so on, private and separate from other departments.

Similarly, they'd also work well in situations where you as the site admin want to create entire micro-communities. Take for example a video game publisher. Using Clubs, they could create a micro-community for each of their games, complete with forums, galleries and so forth, and then set the Clubs directory as their overall community homepage. Immediately, they have a setup that hasn't until now been possible out-of-the-box with IPS Community Suite.

 

We expect our clients will come up with some really innovative uses for the new Club functionality, and we can't wait to see what you do. We'd love to hear your feedback - let us know what you think in the comments.

[TobyDeDrone]

What an awesome idea forward ever, backward never.

 

[Icequeen]

This looks great! 

[Barron]

I quite like the idea and could be very beneficial for game communities 

How does it work in terms of registration? New people would still have to register on the main XI homepage I presume and then apply to join the a particular club or can they just join any club as a member? 

[Sitting-Duc]

17 minutes ago, Barron3000 said:

I quite like the idea and could be very beneficial for game communities 

How does it work in terms of registration? New people would still have to register on the main XI homepage I presume and then apply to join the a particular club or can they just join any club as a member? 

So nothing is changing with accounts etc. The homepage will change a bit to promote the clubs and once someone joins the club then the they will be able to follow and see that games content. At the beginning I would only be looking at the open clubs for the games where non-club members can view the content but need to join to contribute: 

We could then expand the clubs with closed ones for member groups such as breakfast clubs and tourney clubs etc. 

Still in the ideas stage so I welcome any suggestions for how we could use this..

[Sitting-Duc]

So ignore the broken images but this is something like it might look...

Homepage: 

Forums:

 

[WookieSM]

That sounds like a smashing idea big thumbs up from me 

[Barron]

I quite like the idea altogether, looking forward to it

[JohnnyDos]

JUST DO IT! DUC.

[Unchileno]

15 hours ago, Sitting-Duc said:

Hi all!

In the next major update of the website that will be coming this summer the platform developers are introducing a feature called 'clubs'. I think this is going to be an exciting and fascinating feature for us to adopt as it looks to help support a wider variety of games and sub-communities. The idea behind it will be that we create a 'club' for each of the game types we support with servers and also the games that we don't.The core parts to the community would stay as is such as general discussion/clan members/admin forums. 

These clubs will be available for anyone to join and are essentially micro communities within the site. Each micro community will have it's own 'homepage', 'forums'. 'downloads', 'events' and 'gallery'. The hope will be that with this organisational structure there will be more freedom for the games to have an identity of there own and also for users to have more choice in the content they are shown on the website. The events is something I am really looking forward to using as each game club can have a proper events system for tourneys etc. 

So that's about it with the update from me, I would love it if you would read the following update from the platform the developers and gave your feedback of what we could do with it: 

@Sitting-Duc 

 

[KillerKitty]

on the one hand i like the idea, curious to try that

on the other hand i need to go to more clubs to see whats new which will confuse me even more and i just got used to this forum update....lol

seriously, looking forward to it, hope i dont miss any exciting news then

[Mule]

Just now, Unchileno said:

@Sitting-Duc 

 

HORNY IDIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeHaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaW!

[Mule]

Just now, KillerKitty said:

on the one hand i like the idea, curious to try that

on the other hand i need to go to more clubs to see whats new which will confuse me even more and i just got used to this forum update....lol

seriously, looking forward to it, hope i dont miss any exciting news then

Don't worry  @ Unchileno  wont let you miss anything!

[Sourtap]

Looks great!

[Unchileno]

37 minutes ago, Mule said:

Don't worry  @ Unchileno  wont let you miss anything!

Nope I wont....

[EDD THE DUCK]

I like orange clubs

[Poseidon]

That sounds awesome and looks cool!  

[WookieSM]

7 hours ago, EDD THE DUCK said:

I like orange clubs

Owww man i love these to want some right now i said now 

[KicknDatAzz]

On 7/2/2017 at 11:32 AM, EDD THE DUCK said:

I like orange clubs

is that orange chocolate???

if soo..... ewwwwww

[KicknDatAzz]

this looks cool, I can see the benefit from it. I know you guys are working on this integration, but I am curious how the website themes will or wont be affected by this.

There is a LOT of white in your test images....

[iboomboom]

I vote for a gentlemen's club. You know the one where men come in well dressed, socialize, drink tea, play polo, enjoy a club sandwich, and smack a french maid's booty. 

[Bogleg]

We just need to make sure we keep that test club - the Special Club.  Rugger definitely would fit well in any club about special people.

[AyaqGuyaq]

Way to keep it new and exciting, @Sitting-Duc.

As always, we appreciate you and the programmers' hard work on behalf of the community.

I think someone just "jismed," and it wasn't me!!

"She said I saw you on the counter--wasn't me!!

She said I saw you on the sofa--wasn't me!!"

Sorry, too tired and excited to be home to sleep after my gold-mining experiences.

Yes, plural.

Ayaq

[Sitting-Duc]

bump

[iboomboom]

" identity of there own"

their*

You're welcome.

Sincerely,
Grammar Nazi.