Build a Community on DeviantART with the Groups Feature

DeviantART itself is an online community, but the new Groups feature will enable users to build and manage their own smaller gatherings, with specific or more of a general theme. Launched as a Beta service, it has already recorded more than 25,000 group registrations in the first four days, with 800,000+ participants.

Users will be able to create small communities on different subjects, add members, or allow them to join upon request their community. The new administration features will also permit an owner to transfer administration or moderation duties to other members willing to help with the group's growth. Groups can be listed as public or private.

The fresh service enables DeviantART users to share content with each other, based on their common interests in a more organized manner than the old profile “Friends” and “deviantWATCH” features.

Group admins also have a new template and widget engine to style the group's main page as they wish, with various predefined page and widget layouts. A fresh widget editor was also added to provide drag and drop page customization. An automated tool was introduced for DA club owners to convert their club into a group, for the enhanced user and content management tools. The tool can be accessed at this link by DeviantArt users.

Group-enabled art submissions and collaborative blogging for owned / joined groups will enable authors to publish content only for their desired groups, bringing more control over the authoring process in DeviantART.

Along with the service's launch, a widget for the profile page has been added allowing users to showcase followed groups on their personal DeviantART page. The Groups pages have their own URL, so the name must be different from any existing usernames. A group name can also be spotted by the presence of the “#” character before a name.

For an annual fee, a premium version called Super Groups is available with unique features like skinnable blogs, group name highlighting in the Groups Directory to enhance visibility and the ability to customize applications.

Some screenshots of the group registration, approval and profile page widgets are attached to this article.



A demo video of the service is also embedded below, courtesy of DeviantART.