IFDB Clubs?

General IF Community Resources
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What are Clubs on the IFDB?
What can you do in those pages?

(It might be neat to have club specific polls, or recommendation lists made by the club :woman_shrugging: )

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I know it combines wish lists and play lists for the people signed up as members, e.g. I’m pretty sure the Seattle/Tacoma IF group occasionally has a look at their page page to see if it helps suggest what they might play. They obviously don’t use it for the news/events feature, heh.

Edit: looks like there aren’t very many of them (at least not public ones, but I’d be somewhat surprised if there were a whole horde of private ones): IFDB search for public clubs with 100 members or less.

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I saw them, one of them is the ClubFloyd group- they are the ones who meet weekly on ifMUD to do walkthroughs of games, right? What else does ClubFloyd do, since I think most of the action is on the forum?

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IMO, IFDB clubs aren’t very useful. The features of clubs are:

  • They’re listed on IFDB’s “Browse Clubs” page, so people can discover them. (But there are only 14 clubs in total.)
  • Each club generates a merged wishlist and playlist for all club members. I could imagine that being useful, but I don’t think anybody uses it today, not even the largest club, ClubFloyd.
  • Club administrators can:
    • Post news about the club, which appears in IFDB’s home page in the “New on IFDB” section. (No one has done this since 2018, and only 28 times ever.)
    • Require users to enter a password to join.
    • Make the membership list visible only to club members.

IFDB clubs do not offer club-specific polls or recommendation lists. Even worse, IFDB provides no way for club administrators to communicate with club members except to post news on the IFDB home page. Posting club news generates no emails or notifications for club members.

In practice, I think most IF clubs (including my own, the SF Bay Area IF Meetup) just use other sites (including intfiction.org) and newsletter software to contact their members. I use Meetup.com.

Meetup.com has many thousands of meetups, and we often get new members from people just browsing to us from other meetups. IFDB will never have that.

I’m not sure I have the heart (or the free time) to delete the IFDB clubs feature, but I’d probably be in favor of deleting it entirely, if someone wanted to do the legwork.

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