The future of Groups on Thingiverse

How do you use Groups on Thingiverse? What would you like to see?

I came here from the original topic that spawned this one, but to agree with the folks there: Groups would most likely be a very good way for good models that are relatively niche to find their audience directly.

To give a personal example, I recently made a few weapon models from the Fire Emblem series, and not to pat myself on the back too much, but they were pretty good. However, they only got a few likes each, presumably because they were a bit on the obscure side in terms of well-known weapons from the series. They’re not the kinds of things people would go out of their way to search up, but they’re something fans of the series would probably be interested in making if they knew they existed. But since they don’t, one got 3 likes, and the other one shared a similar fate, and only went up to 15 likes after it was featured on the home page.

I thought it would be a good idea to message other people that have made good Fire Emblem models and ask them to add them to the Group, but when I tried to add a second model to it, it seemed to work, but then wouldn’t be visible in the Group after refreshing the page. As such, I didn’t really want to ask people to join the Group if they couldn’t actually post anything.

Here’s the group I’m talking about: Thingiverse - Fire Emblem | 3D Printing Group & Community

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The groups are gone?

I can still select a group by I don’t find the groups :frowning:

You can still find them here: Thingiverse - 3D Printing Groups & Communities

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Thank you for the link. Is this link somewhere available at the head on the main page? I think this was replaced on explore with forum. Also the “my groups” is gone.

I use only one group (model trains) to post my related content. It’s another way to access the small niche most of my projects are related to. Beside some old text posts, I think this is a things stack.

My thoughts, but no solution

It seems that sub categories are also difficult to access now, we have categories available from the head/top menu and the only way to find subcategories is the filter. I know, categories are another topic. As fare as I noticed the subcategories are included in the main category, I think, this changed :+1:

I like structures. Tags at a things are very dynamic but aren’t a structure. A group with things is one possibility for another access path. Maybe a finer category structure with multiple selects could make such groups obsolete.

My example ( Bernburg Bears at the Castle by Tomek_s_scaled_world - Thingiverse ):

I created an interpretation of a sculpture (art?) of a bear (animal) with a shield. The original use is for a castle in 1:50 scale as design element (buildings, architecture). Printing smaller version would put it in a (model) railway context, but there are no wheels on it. It could be used as accessory at wargaming (tabletop). Or let’s use them for chess (game)?

I think we could improve accessibility when we make multiple categories possible, this would reduce the need for things only groups. And yes, I don’t know how prevent spam, if we find more use cases for my model.

PS: Posting into group actually don’t work from “edit thing”, I just tried. Posting works from group and “post a thing”.

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