Hi,

I have had this discussion often and I agree it is definitely a missing element, but not necessarily related to UserGroups. I want a way of plugging in a chat/forum component for Events and Groups. Unfortunately this is VERY difficult without writing it from scratch. You would either need to modify the Forums to incorporate a GroupID, or you would need to write a very basic module like the old Discussion module that could do this. But the moment you do this people would ask for more functionality and for it to function like a Forum, so you end up writing a Forum module from scratch... it's a tricky situation...

In the meantime, I am using a Jscript widget to allow basic collaboration but there is no authentication so it is fairly useless in 80% of use cases (but works ok on PokerDIY - check out the comments/ratings on the UserProfile and Groups page (at bottom).

For the record, I am considering a module like Facebook's core Wall that could be attached to Events, Groups and Profiles to allow collaboration. It would NOT evolve into the Forum and would be used for basic communication (it would use the Rich Text Editor so would allow for HTML/pics etc) but it would function almost exactly like FaceBook's wall... (the security rights would be configurable - eg. only your friends could write on your profile wall, your invited guests could write on your event wall, and your group members could write on your group wall etc..

I need to know if this would be useful or not...

At some point in the future a rating system could be built in.