*The State of Clubs

I'd like to open up a discussion about Clubs.

At the moment, Clubs themselves aren't doing so well.  I've been debating with myself for a while over what to do with them, and have come up with an idea - but I would like to get the community voice.

We have currently gone 3-4 months in a row of several Clubs having no president.  Moderators have the ability to pick up president-less Clubs, so I am grateful to those that have done so.  I've spoken to a few members and the general consensus seems to be that a month is just not long enough for a president to do anything meaningful.

What I would like to propose is a merger of official Clubs with Groups.

We remove Clubs completely as an official system and move all the main functions of Clubs into Groups: registering horses, club bank, stud book, sale book, a "group card" or membership card.  

The only thing I would be hesitant to move would be shows, as it would be possible to create an unlimited amount of groups to get the "special" shows.

Members can then create a group and run it indefinitely, giving up the group leadership if they ever wanted to step down.  I would also change the current owner system so that the owner of the group can appoint up to 10 different "admins" of the group.

I think merging Clubs and Groups would be a good idea due to the fact that they are currently quite similar - it might be refreshing to have just Groups where players can decide what horses they want to accept into their registry and it can be consistent instead of changing every month, and so on and so forth.

I'd just like to be clear that nothing will happen until probably April, maybe May, so don't worry about your current presidencies and elections.

So what are your thoughts?

Last edited on 2017-08-10 at 10:54:24 by River

if the new club/group mergers were able to have shows that were exclusive to their club/group members i would wholeheartedly support the combination.

that said, there are groups like "coffee Lovers" which doesn't make sense to register horses to, so that might be an issue?

At the same time, I don't see why we can't have horses registered to Coffee Lovers.. it's up to the horse owner whether they want to be discerning with the clubs they register to :)

that is a good point!
i'm imaging my old teke herd that was named after types of coffee being registered with that club. I like it!

I really like this idea. Especially if they have the features of of the "Official" groups.

The idea of being able to register horses to member groups is actually something I thought about suggesting for awhile, but I was afraid I might sound too elitist. xD I've always personally thought that registration for clubs was too general/not strict enough, and thought it'd be interesting to be able to set your own standards within your own clubs.

I do think the clubs have become rather pointless and need a revamp, so I like the idea of giving their powers to other groups. Honestly if that happens I think we should just do away with Mega Shows.

So instead of one club were all breeders of a particular breed can go to register horses, find horses for stud & sale and all the breed specific club items, there could be an infinite amount of different groups for each of the different breeds? And each of these groups would then get to make their own set of requirements for registration, shows & contests? I'm not in any groups so I'm just trying to clarify things in my head. Thanks!

@Valzed, minus the shows, yes. What I would hope is that certain groups would become more popular than the others, so there might be specific groups that become more prestigious to join and have horses registered at - someone might create the Arabian Breeding Group which has different goals to the Arabian Association, and so on and so forth.

There's also the option to not create a breed-specific group, so they could be a Dressage group. Or just a fun group that likes to talk about a similar interest with other group members that isn't related to horses, but is still involved in the game.

As a side note, I think I will probably end up just nixing the club shows - I think if it was converted to group shows, they'd be too easily exploited. E.g. a group of 3 members create a group just for themselves, they all show their horses in the shows, split the profits and it then becomes very exclusive and doesn't really encourage members to join groups, but make their own.

Ah ha! Got it! Without having any group experience I was at a loss. Thank you so much for clarifying things for me!

Hmm... yes, I could easily see shows being exploited. I think you may have the right idea about just dropping the shows.

I must say I personally love this idea, as with the current system i really don't enter my horses in clubs because the standards of the club seem to change depending on the president, whether it's too high to me, or too low.

However abbey my real question is, how are you going to incentivize people to join these new clubs? As personally, I think they main problem with clubs is that they literately do nothing. There is no advantage to joining a club, and no disadvantage to not joining one, and I fear we might get into the same situation where people don't join these new clubs because there is no real benefit to doing so.

I rather like this, but I'm a bit on the fence to be honest. By registering my horses into a Club, they are representing their breed. However, what if there end up being several Groups focusing on said breed, with the horses scattered about them? It just doesn't seem very formal that way. But I still support this- Clubs are rather pointless lol

There's not really supposed to be an incentive to joining groups other than just being a social thing.

Kind of off topic but also not really: I think the club house pages could use a little revamping too, especially if we're going to be expanding the number of member groups. A search feature for looking through clubs would be nice, and I'm thinking maybe it might be nice to be able to select a category or two for our groups. Like there could be categories for groups related to specific breeds, groups related to a discipline, art groups, etc. Just to make browsing groups easier. Also maybe the 'top' groups page could be expanded to cover groups with the most horse registrations and things like that.

This probably won't be a big deal if the number of groups stays small if but if this revamp is successful and more start being created, a better way to look through the groups would be nice too. (:

(And I apologize if this was something you'd already thought about, Abbey; just thought I'd throw it out anyway.)

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I have something else I think might be interesting so I'll throw it out there for consideration/to be built upon if anyone else is interested.

Short story: Groups can hand out trophies to members or horses.

Long story: A new section could be added to member and horses pages that can show trophies/badges they've earned from groups (to keep it small it could maybe just display the latest and have a 'see all' option). Group owners can create contests and things, and then at the conclusion hand out trophies to the winners that will be displayed in their little trophy cabinets. The trophies can either be uploaded by the group owner (something small, like 100x100 or less) or they can choose from a generic default picture of a trophy. Group owners can customize each trophy, to give it a name related to the contest, and then can dish it out to a member and/or horse. So a horse can have a section that might include trophies like "1st Place November Beauty Contest" and a member might have something like "Biggest Group Donator 2016."

Thoughts?

EDIT: If a display was added to member pages, there should probably be two sections: one for trophies earned by the member just as a member, and another listing all their trophies their horses have earned.

Last edited on 2017-02-16 at 14:03:54 by Wicked

Wicked, I love the trophy idea! What if the one of the trophies was tag size and both deluxe & basic account holders could use them for tags? I think basic account holders might like that.

Going off of the trophies idea, it might be cool if points earned by members belonging to clubs meant something . . . like if maybe there were a leaderboard for points among clubs? Or maybe trophies were based off of them? It might be nice to see those earned points that are listed become relevant.