Last night, we launched a new feature on the site: Groups!  Groups are a great way to meet and get support from members with similar interests as you.  In the few hours that groups have been live, we've already seen groups formed for vegetarians, regional groups to meet people in your area, running groups, and more.  

To get started with Groups, go to the Community tab, then click on Groups. From this page, you can find a group to join, or you can even create your own! Each group has it's own message board that the group can use to support and motivate one another.  Once you join a group, the Group's message board will automatically be added to your main Community page so that you can easily view any new Group topics.

A few important things to note about Groups:

Groups can be public or private.  

If you create a public group, anyone can join and anyone can read the group forum and participate.  If you create a private group, people must receive an invitation to the group from one of the existing members to join. Note, though, that any member of a private group can invite additional members to join.

Groups are mostly self-moderated.   

Each group's administrators are responsible for appointing some members of the group as moderators, and those moderators are responsible for ensuring that the group and sitewide rules are followed in the groups forums.  If you report a post in a group, that report will be sent to the groups moderators, NOT the sitewide moderators.

Groups have some more leeway than the main forums, but still must follow a set of sitewide rules. 

We've released new community guidelines which explain the difference between the rules for Groups and the rules for the main forums.  Each group can then add it's own rules.  As long as the group moderators are enforcing the sitewide rules appropriately, we will largely leave them alone. But if you see an instance where the sitewide rules are being broken and the groups' moderators are not dealing with the situation appropriately, let Steven know and we'll investigate promptly.

If you run into any problems or issues with the new group features. please let us know!  We hope we've worked most of the kinks out, but we'll be happy to take a look ASAP if you notice something that doesn't seem to be working properly.

Thanks, and we can't wait to see what groups get started!  Hope you are all enjoying MFP.

Best,

Mike, Al, Steven, and the MFP team