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Posted by: CrypticGuardian
Posted by: natedogr
I was just wondering if most groups had closed or open membership? Closed membership requires admin approval for new members. Why did you choose to open or close your group's membership?
Just vote yes for closed and no for open.
When a group is created it starts out with a closed membership. Usually founders that want to build up their group by member count will open their group membership in order to save time from having to accept each member. Some things they also do is advertise in The Classifieds and send private messages to individual users inviting them to join their group.
Founders usually keep their group membership closed when the group is dedicated for only a certain amount of people or a specific clan, group, or other reason to keep it isolated from the majority of the Bungie.net population. An example would be the HFCS group, which is restricted to join only allowing moderators and administrators to discuss private topics. Another reason users keep their group membership closed is to avoid people randomly joining to spam or flame the forum.
No offense Guardian, but what is the point of this reply? You just gave a bunch of completely obvious information (founders who want to allow anybody to join their group keep it open, while some founders keep their group membership closed in order to restrict the membership from the b.net general population) that is partially wrong (no, groups do not automatically start out with closed membership -- a founder has the option to either open or close membership when creating the group) and partially off-topic (ways that founders advertise their group) and that does not respond to the original questions at all (are most groups open or closed? and why did you choose to open or close your group's membership?).
Posted by: atomic weggie
What makes forum groups special are the members. If you let anyone in the group, then it becomes just a microcosm of the regular B.net forums. If that's the case, then what's the point of having a private group?
I disagree partially with this, weggie. A group with a focused purpose that is distinct from those of the public forums is most certainly not a microcosm of those forums. Also, I don't think that a group's members are the only thing that makes a group special.
Groups can be distinguished or made special either by their members or their purpose. A group with open membership and clear, focused purpose (CompoundIntelligence, The Guide, The Black Chapter, KOTOR, and many others) allows a large number of people to participate in b.net activities that have nothing to do with the purposes of the public forums and within which a markedly different form of discussion or information may be found. Take the Guide as an example: the Guide has completely open membership, and yet has very little discussion of random topics. People mostly drop in to read the moderator / notable community member interviews and chapter reviews, comment on them, or create them themselves. The discussion is very clean and mature and despite the open membership and the group's old age, we have never had "random spammers" join up just to spam it. The group is not special merely because of its members, but because of its unique format and relatively cool (in my opinion) purpose.
Otherwise, though, I agree. I never really saw the point of the "off-topic" groups, and I'd really like to see some Community members getting creative with groups and finding a purpose that is unique and specially suited to the group format. That would really help groups take off in a big way, I think.
[Edited on 07.17.2007 4:44 AM PDT]