Social Groups

As part of the Animesuki ChoiceAwards we've had a Social Group setup for discussing various issue. The conclusion after a year of trying to use it? Social Groups are the last place on this forum you would ever want to discuss things! It's essentially easier to send someone a text file with the message then it is to send the massage with social groups.

The social group subscribtion and social group discussion subscribtion feature is nearly invisible in your profile; it's basically bellow even Forum subscribtions and you have to be looking really hard to find it or find if it's updated.

But lets say you have no problem of updates since you check it every day manually or something absolutely crazy like that.

How usable is a social group for discussing things?

Problems

1. You can't quote nobody. To quote your best bet is to color your text maybe italics, probably try some funny symbols.
   
   
2. Wanna post a list? Well too bad. Minus sign is all you got. If you got a list with a sublist in it, text file and megaupload.
   
   
3. Got more then 2 paragraphs? You have to create another post. And then another. And then another. The entire system was basically designed for people that write 1-line.
   
   
4. Bolding, headers? too sophisticated.
   
   
5. Thread reaches page 2, well good luck in people seing page 2. There are no pages on the actual group page, and clicking the topic will always lead to the top of page one. There is a pagination but it's all at the very bottom of the page and you have to know to look for it.

Those are just the main issues.

At the moment we rely on purely private messages. It's awkward but not nearly as awkward as social groups and at the very least, it works.

My issue with what you said though is that in the past when the problems with using social groups was brouth up you've said social groups are NOT for discussion and so on and that's why they are intentionally horrible (and why you've intentionally set them to be horrible and unusable). And yet now you come and say they are the alternative to having a discussion. Really? They most definetly still aren't even remotely usable for even a few people discussing things! The only thing you can do with them is post images and maybe 1-liners; not discussing anything.

So which is it?