Updates To Groups & Build Page Beta

Hi folks, today I’m excited to announce some major changes to our Groups features, and the ongoing iteration of our Build page beta.

For those who have been following along in Discord, we’re currently progressing two significant pieces of work to continually improve the experience we’re offering players. This is part of a broader initiative to drive more meaning to the Snow Crows account experience, and there’s much more planned yet.

Our Groups feature was originally developed as an MVP (minimum viable product) so has largely languished gathering dust in the corner. Today that all changes with some significants steps forward:

• We have renamed the page Group Finder to better convey our intent for its use and growth.
• Groups now have prettified endpoints, no more UUIDs in the URL. Vie for the best URL with your fellow players.
• The filtering system has been expanded to include language, mindset, and focus, with a revised category listing. When listing and looking for groups, you can now match your specific preferences.
• The listing view has been refreshed and brought inline with other pages; it now uses some of our more recent design patterns and components.
• As part of the above changes, the listing is now sorted to prioritise verified groups; followed by the latest update time so that groups that have been most recently active are surfaced ahead of others.
• The group page has been refreshed and brought up to date as well. There will be further improvements here based on player feedback.
• We’ve simplified some of the configuration settings, making it easier to understand when your group is and isn’t visible to users.
• We’ve entirely replaced the application system, introducing a new site-wide Inbox feature. Users will now be able to contact all Leaders in a group Thread on the website.
• Last but not least, we’ve added clearer messaging about who can list a group and how.

It’s worth noting proactively that Inbox is very early in its development lifecycle and there’ll be some further iterations before I’m confident with its positioning. This will include messaging individual users and adding additional users to existing threads.

With the extent of changes being rolled out today I am aware of some specific limitations.

• [Feature] There is now no way for additional members to be added to a group. There are planned features to allow group Leaders to invite users to groups from profile pages.
• [Improvement] Email notifications aren’t sent for new on-site messages.
• [Bug] The Inbox fails to reload and show the latest message after it is sent.
• [Improvement] Anyone in a thread can archive a thread and it will be removed for all participants - based on user feedback and insights we will make a judgment call whether to restrict this in future to the thread’s creator, or to allow users to view archived threads.
• [Improvement] There is no pagination applied to the threads sidebar, so for users with large numbers of threads this will become cumbersome quickly.

Today I’ve also released some further iterative improvements to the new build page beta. These are primarily targeted to address elements that have been missing from the page for quite some time, as well as better optimise the overview components for space. The Build Template and DPS Report Link have also been restored for beta users.

There are some ongoing layout issues across screen sizes that we’re working to address. Please bear with us as we work through these.

As always, if you have any feedback or things you’d like to see don’t hesitate to reach out on our Discord server.