EC addition...

Would it actually offer any benefit though?

I know there are various features on EC that aren't based on support/resources, but would having regional pages not encourage cliques to form? Iirc, vBulletin has a Societies/Groups feature that was disabled for that reason, and I don't necessarily see what the necessity would be for enabling it for this type of usage. As a support forum I consider it fairly important to keep everybody as open with each other as possible, and I think the more 'corners' you create on the site the more likely you are to start seeing certain groups of members settling into them and intimidating outsiders from going there. That would completely go against EC's 'open for all' vibe.

The most apparent problem for the idea would be how it works alongside the security features. The personal information ban is difficult to maintain when there are groups for every region that is represented by members, and there is no way the staff could monitor each and every group to make sure no members are being silly enough to post information that allows them to be traced (whether it's an address, email, full name etc). I'm not against the idea because it gives a networking type feel, I just don't really think it's effective to have staff monitor groups when they should be focusing on the support aspect of the site.

As I said, I'm not against it because of the whole social networking/facebook vibe it may give off, but I do not see how it would integrate into the sites security without requiring the staff to watch each and every group closely. Wall messages already test us enough, and I think anything more would just cause a complete burnout. If that was to happen and the security slipped then who knows what the owners would do to EC... :eek:

Although, that's my perspective only. That's not me vetoing the idea or speaking on behalf of the staff/anybody else.

 

The arcade, whilst nothing to do with support/resources, doesn't come with the security risks posed by this idea. Chat, Arcade, Chit Chat, Fun and Games are all places that members can go to chillax. It's illogical to expect people to come here and constantly focus on offering support and advice. You don't do it, I don't, and neither should anybody else. We would simply burnout, so it's nice to have various features for us to relax (so to speak).

The problem with regional pages is that the security issue is always going to be there no matter how you try and integrate it. It's one thing creating a new usergroup of staff to monitor it, but it's another to expect them to do so every day of the year. The staff system is already being discussed because it can be confusing at times, and we have seen from the Chat Moderator usergroup that moderation can be pretty weak at times. That's nothing against the chat mods, but it's expected when you rely on two staff to monitor an entire feature that is used by numerous members. You would need a much larger team to monitor a feature that would be as widely used as group pages, and that wouldn't guarantee that all personal information would be caught and removed.

Furthermore, simply adding numbers to the staff team doesn't actually solve anything. The largerr a team becomes the more work it is to maintain it, and the site is not in a position where it can have a large amount of staff accessing one place. The staff forums contain lots of sensitive information about past and present users, and it would be insane to allow anybody to access that because they are monitoring x part of the site. In order to add a new usergroup of staff you have to look at the implications it would have for the privacy of members, and at the moment it would require such extensive work to maintain that privacy that the support aspect of the site would inevitably be neglected whilst the planning and development of a new system was introduced.

I just don't see what it would be worth in the long-term considering the amount of effort it would need. As stated above, it sounds good as an idea, but implimenting it would require a lot of work, and I am not sure so much work is worth it when the feature has such a high likelihood of messing with EC's security features. Whether we hate those security measures or not, they aren't something that we can meddle with and hope that any violations will just result in the member being banned. We may just reach a point where EC's owners/legal team decide that all method of communication is to be removed (which they have wanted before) and it's a pretty slippery slope for that to happen. The only way to avoid that is to keep all violations to an absolute-minimum, and a group page feature is a high risk idea that can go against that.