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.