User Groups -- how do you use 'em?

[achtungbaby]

Just curious to hear some ideas on how they can be best utilized. So far (aside from having your normal mods/members/admins groups), the most common use I've heard is attaching the subscriptions to the user group.

Any others?

[Colosus]

On my site we use usergroups for everything. We have usergroups to give automatic promotions each year for registration time (today is our 4th birthday. yay!), we also have usergroups for development teams, specific moderators, community members, special titles. And then we add people into the contributors usergroup as a subgroup to give them special access to things only contributors can see.

[Alex Older]

forums i'm part of they use groups for access to private forums.

[achtungbaby]

On my site we use usergroups for everything. We have usergroups to give automatic promotions each year for registration time (today is our 4th birthday. yay!), we also have usergroups for development teams, specific moderators, community members, special titles. And then we add people into the contributors usergroup as a subgroup to give them special access to things only contributors can see.

But what exactly do you do with them? Give certain groups their own forums? I have one group that's comprised of members with at least 1,000 posts -- but I dunno what to do with em!

[Colosus]

Everyone when they first sign up is tossed into the Registered usergroup. They are given access to most everything on the site except that they can't post in the unmoderated forum (only read). After 1 month they are moved to the "Members" group which gives them posting priviledges to the unmoderated forum.

After 1 year they are moved to the Veteran usergroup which changes their title to Veteran.

After 2 years, they are moved the the Veteran 2 usergroup which changes their title to Veteran^2.

Same for 3 and 4 with appropriate titles.

The contributor usergroup is set as a subgroup for people that donate. This group sets a second title under their main one that says "Contributor". They are also given rights to view their postcounts which are hidden from non-contributors. The hope here is give contributors more features as the site continues to grow.