jeff101 Lv 1
I don't know if this has been suggested before (I did look around for it), but it might be useful to let people form Groups within Groups. This way if a school teacher has several classes playing Foldit, the teacher can make one big Group for all of her classes, and then one Sub-Group for each different section or semester. Another application of this could be for families. A family could make their own little Foldit Group and then decide to add it as a Sub-Group to one of the larger already-established Foldit Groups. Having the ability to form Sub-Groups might also help the largest Groups preserve a small-team atmosphere without having to break apart. Haven't some of you argued that having smaller Groups encourages more diversity in Foldit structure solutions and methods?
In any case, you could have a window within the Foldit GUI allowing Chat for just the Sub-Group, you could have Recipes and Structures shared only with members of the Sub-Group, etc. Also, Shared Recipes and Structures from a Group would be inherited by all members of that Group's Sub-Groups. Then, in the teacher example, the teacher could have certain Recipes and structures shared with all of her classes, and the students in each section or semester could adapt them and share them as they see fit, sometimes only sharing within their Sub-Group, and sometimes sharing with all of the teacher's other classes.
Not sure how deep you'd want the Sub-Group nesting to go, but I think adding at least one layer would be helpful.
Thanks for reading!