- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Is Your Group Home Blank And Boring
Now that you've got your own brand new group, it looks a bit blank let's take a closer look at your group's home page. The first thing you'll notice is the big graphic header at the top of the page. primarily you'll have the default theme, but later on you'll be able to choose from other themes to skin your page and make it look different.
Right below the header is the main navigation bar for your group. From here you can access all the various pieces and content within your group. There are four main sections, each with a few subsections. They are:
* Home: This is your main page. The subpages underneath home are News, Search News, Group Settings and Admin Tools (more on these below).
* Forum: Your own personal forum for your group. There are no submenu options.
* Resources: This is your group's collection of content databases. From the sub menu you can jump straight to your Guest Book, Contact Info, FAQ or Links resources. Click on Custom to go to an index of your custom resources.
* Members: This tab takes you to your membership management screen (more on this below).
Below the main nav bar is some general information about your group. All of the personal stuff you entered back when you create the group is displayed here - description, motto, founders, location, etc..
The rest of the page consists of your group's news - broken up into "Announcements" and "News".
News???
The group news system will be one of the most important, it means of staying in contact with your members. Just like we post news to the front page of Bungie.net, you and your group members can post news stories on your group front page for others to read. Administrators of a group can determine who can post news and each story can be set to be viewable by specific groups of people.
The "Announcements" area is for displaying special important news headlines. When you create a news post, you can flag your story as a "Memoranda", "Declaration" or "Directive." These special categories are for more important headlines thus the special treatment on the front page.
Below the annoucement area is the "regular" news. Just like on the Bungie.net front page, you'll see the headline, the author, the time it was posted and a summary blurb from the story. Clicking on the headline or on the "continues" link will allow you to read the story in its entirity.
Submitting news is as easy as clicking the "submit news" button on your group's front page. The submit news page will prompt you for the title, the summary text, the full story, etc.. - just like when you submit a story to the Bungie.net front page. You can even choose to have your story cross-posted to your forum for discussion. When news is submitted, it will either appear directly on the front page (if the submitter has permission) or it will appear in the approval queue.
Setting and Tools
* Anyone with adequate privileges can go back and make changes to the basic elements of a group by clicking on the "Group Settings" link. Here you can change your quick linkname, edit your membership rules, change your skin/theme, and update your motto and more.
* Members with sufficient priveleges can also access the group's Admin Tools. There are several main tools that empower group staff to manage and moderate the activity within their group.
* News Queue: Anyone who doesn't have permission to post news directly to the front page will post their news to the approval queue. From here you can reject or approve any submitted news stories.
* Blacklist Management: Is someone annoying you or spamming your group? Blacklist them! A blacklisted user is essentially blocked from interacting with your group in any way.
* Security Role Editor: Everyone who is a member of your group is assigned a security role. The security role determines what "power" they have in your group - can they post news? Change your settings? Approve new members? All of these things can be customized by you and you can even create your own security roles complete with your own custom names.
* Member Management: This page shows a listing of all your current members and gives you the ability to edit their security role, kick them from the group or blacklist them.
Resources
A group's resources are permanent databases for members to create and store content in. A member may or may not be able to create a new resource or edit and existing one depending on the security role they have been assigned. Viewing privileges can also be set to each individual entry into a resource. Beyond the core 5 resources, groups can have up to 25 custom resources to hold whatever content you wish. Clicking on the "custom" link in the Resources subnav bar will bring you to a list of all your existing custom resources. A custom resource can be up to 6 columns wide, though please note that the site itself doesn't have much width to work with. As such, using 6 column resources with lots of data will result in a less than ideal layout as text is forced to wrap. Ideally you should keep your resource text short and sweet or when longer content is called for, limit the amount of columns to 4 or less.
Adverting
* By using Classifieds!
* Sending chapter invites to everyone via personal messages
This has pretty much the same effect as advertising, an in it's essence, is pretty much the same thing. Chapter invites pretty much are the equivelance of e-mail spam. If you have to ask people to join your chapter, you probably don't got much going on. People can sense this.
* Claiming to have "exclusive material" when it's not
This may not be as big now, but it was a while ago. If you claim to have "special Halo info" or other things that are supposedly exclusive to your chapter, you had better be right!
* Making you chapter sound better than it is
It is better for a person to come to your chapter with low expectations, than to go with high expectations and be let down.
* Making tons of databases
Overdoing it never helped anyone. I have been to chapters that have 25 different databases going. Although it may seem like they have "alot to offer", it ends up being too much! Half of the databases fail due to lack of maintenance, and many of the good ones get overlooked. Find a couple cool ideas, and stick to those. If they do really well, maybe add on a couple more. The more you have, the easier it is to get confused and lost in your chapter!
I hope you liked it that taken me a week to write