Change the default settings for the groups

~waking-dreams Feb 11, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

This seems to be tripping up a lot of people. Under the default settings for a new group on DeviantArt, nobody can join the group, and nobody but the founder can post anything. As a result, there are a great many one person groups, in which the founder is left wondering why nobody joins. After this mystery is resolved, more frustration follows for new members who find that they can't post.

No other social network I know of does this. Why would they? Groups are there to be used.

Note to other users:

The default settings can be changed by doing the following:

1. Click on "admin area"
2. Click on "manage members"

You will then see a listing of the different types of members in the left hand column - "members", "contributors", "co-founders", etc. Click on "Members" - you'll see it right on top of "Any Member of Affiliates" - and take a look at the menu that appears on the right hand side of the screen. Scroll down to "show all folders", and click on that. You'll see a listing of the various galleries that you've set up, if you've set up any, and you'll be able to toggle between the default setting of "are not allowed" to "are subject to vote" (if you want to screen new content) or "are automatically approved".

Click on another of the member types listed on the left, click on "Members" again, scroll down to "show all collections", and repeat the process with the collections for your group.

Do the same for the other membership types. This could easily end up taking a while.

Devious Comments (Add yours)

^3wyl Feb 11, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

There are already +faqs on it, though.

I guess dA could change it, but then as soon as you've made a group, you may not necessarily want people joining when you haven't got it all set up yet, content wise.

~waking-dreams Feb 11, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

I'm not sure what you mean by that. As the members will, one expects, be providing most of the content, how could the group be "all set up yet, content wise", before their arrival? Isn't the whole point of having a group that in that sense, it is always a work in progress?

But I think we're in danger of wandering off in vagueness, when there is a very distinct and easily identified problem that we could end up forgetting to address along the way - the large number of group founders who have been so confused by the default settings, that their groups never become usable at all, and sit unused and idle for years.

Nothing vague about that problem.

^3wyl Feb 12, 2013 Hobbyist Photographer

So the group won't have an introduction, rules, other information that needs to be written? Much less the permissions set. If certain default settings were changed, then it could cause quite a lot of havoc, and you'd still have to find your way to the roster to change them, regardless.

If they are confused and can't move forward, they can try to look up tutorials, or go to +help desk to ask, or go to the +faq, instead of sitting there and doing nothing. If they'd rather do that, I think it's good that some groups never become usable at all, because it clearly conveys there is no initiative and no drive for the group to succeed.

~waking-dreams Feb 12, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

"So the group won't have an introduction, rules, other information that needs to be written?"

So the membership is going to show up instantaneously? How long do those things you mentioned take to write?

"Much less the permissions set. If certain default settings were changed, then it could cause quite a lot of havoc,"

A problem which, mysteriously, has failed to make itself seen anywhere else. No other social network with which I have any familiarity has ever set its defaults this way. I've been on more than one social network, 3wyl, and having done social bookmarking, I've heard of many more. I even run a number of groups on some of them, and so I am not just wildly guessing when I say that you're blowing smoke.

Rules take a few minutes to write, at the most. Until one goes out and start actively looking for content and members, on the other hand, groups can go years without anybody joining, even on Flickr, a network with well over ten times as many users as DA, a user base that (judging from the ages of the most recent uploads to the galleries I've seen here and the photostreams I've seen on Flickr) seems to have a far higher per capital rate of activity, and really doesn't have a terribly excessive number of groups, because groups with tens or even hundreds of thousands of members in them are easily found. You've spun an altogether unrealistic hypothetical situation, in order to rationalize the continuation of a needless headache. One might well ask why.

Aside from the fact that you're running at least one active group, yourself, and then end of this sort of frustration would diminish your status on DA, because with more active groups, there would be more competition for the activity of the existing membership.

"If they are confused and can't move forward, they can try to look up tutorials"

On the off chance that they're being thwarted by a bizarrely chosen setting, which no other company in the world seems to have chosen. I can also think of at least one case in which the tutorials were demonstrably wrong, I posted about this fact, and one of your moderator buddies responded to this by locking the discussion.

Why would they look? They have no reason to suspect that they're running into anything other than a lack of interest in their groups.

"If they'd rather do that, I think it's good that some groups never become usable at all,"

So, in other words "tough s**t for them"

That's what you just said. If that's how you think, what does it say about DA, that you're allowed to moderate these forums? You're clearly not here to help.

~waking-dreams Feb 12, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

"seems to have a far higher per capital rate of activity"

Read: "seems to have a far higher per capita rate of activity"

~waking-dreams Feb 11, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Note to the staff:

You might be amazed to learn just how many times I've posted the instructions you see listed under "note to other users", in the comments section for groups that were inactive because of these defaults. Why do this, and if you must do this, why leave people in the dark about this?

Somewhere in that massive stack of groups, I accidentally ran into a would-be support group for depression sufferers, while searching for something else - journaling groups, I think it was. Nobody had joined the group, and the owner, who could no longer be contacted, sounded unusually despondant in the description of the group. I guess there were some rejection issues, and this just fed into them. Can you picture the headline you could have ended up with, from that?

As the staff at a much bigger company have been known to say, "don't be evil" - don't create problems just for the sake of proving that you can do so. If for no other reason, how about refraining from doing so, because problems, in general, are so good at snowballing and raising issues that one never even thought would be there.

Note to other users: If you had trouble creating new galleries or collections, just click on "Gallery" (if you want to create new galleries) or "Favourites" (if you want to create new collections), go to the left hand column on the screen, and scroll down to "New Folder" in the first case, or "new collection" in the second. Click on the button, and a new gallery or collection will be created, depending on where you are.

To change the name of a gallery or collection:

The little pencil icon that appears when you bring the cursor up to upper right hand corner of the box associated with a gallery or collection, when clicked, will let you rename the gallery or collection, but, again, DeviantArt has built a booby trap into the system. Your cursor position might not be readily visible, the first time you create a gallery or collection. Your cursor, when you click on the name of the gallery (ie. folder) or collection, will end up at the left end of the name; if you backspace before the first renaming the gallery or collection, you could end up on a different page, but you will need to backspace in order to eliminate default names like "devious gallery" - use the right arrow to get to the end of the default name, and then start backspacing, as you watch the letters of the default name disappear. Then you can enter your own gallery or collection name.

See! Easy! or something. Please pass word about this around, because I'm guessing that my suggestion to create a new group owner's guide is going to be ignored or dismissed, and there is a lot of frustration resulting from the not at all intuitive nature of DA's group interface design. "Complication for its own sake" seems to be a top contender to become the company motto. Or maybe "give evil a chance"? Something like that.

If we can't get the staff to help us, let's at least try to help each other.

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Change the default settings for the groups

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