This is a quick post to let members of the community know that the Development team will be working on the interface for groups over the next few days. Up until now, members of groups could post to their group forums directly through the group homepage. While this was convenient, it didn’t work very well, and group members missed out on some of the bells and whistles that the forum interface provides, such as attaching files to forum posts, marking discussions as “favorites,” and subscribing to favorited posts via email.

What we’re doing now is setting up the group homepages so that they’ll display excerpts of recent forum posts, but will link directly to the forums themselves. Thus, all forum posts will now be written and read on the forums themselves.

That sounds logical, I know, but it’s a little more complicated than it appears to be. We should have everything up and running shortly, but you may notice a bit of wonkiness between now and then. In the meantime, please copy and save any important text you’re writing before you hit those “post” and “reply” buttons.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience that this might cause you, but we thank you for your patience. We should have this cleared up shortly, and we’ll update this post to give you the “all clear.”

Update (8/11/09): Our work is complete. When you visit a group’s page, you will be able to see the latest postings in its forums. But all forum-related links on group pages will now lead to the forums themselves, where you’ll be able to write new posts and reply to older ones.

Thanks for your patience and thanks to Boone Gorges for his work on this.