First of all: Thank you to all 3 of you for your support!

I am going through rather difficult times (related to family), and therefore I am very grateful for your positive feedback.

Please not that (in my view) positive feedback includes the following statement (because it draws attention to something that needs attention -- even if only because it "might be", is a "hunch" or "gut feeling"). This type of feedback is invaluable because it makes me aware of my own "blind spots. Thank you, David!! And now to the statement:

Dav in Phoenix (CCAL30) said:

Hi nmw,

One problem I see with your groups page is that it has both adult groups and christian groups. So that will pretty much turn off everyone.

First of all, I don't think it would turn off either you (David) or Ravi (or a bunch of other people here at omidyar.net -- probably most of the people I have regularly interacted with here at omidyar.net are not only tolerant but even embrace "both sides now" (I think I linked to that song a while back -- I'll see if I can dig it up ;)

But secondly (and this is, I believe your point): it may actually put of something like 99% of the general population. And my guess is that your feeling is that these 99% of the general population might actually reap great profits from interacting more "openly" / "tolerantly" / etc. -- in other words: they might actually be a "target group" we should consider with utmost care.

I agree!

Perhaps the home page should ease them in to the complexities of the modern world more gently. Maybe things don't need to be quite so multi-faceted from the get go. Simplify! (a Quaker credo ;)

So let's imagine a homepage that is more "inviting" (and perhaps that also allows for an "easy" and/or "fast track" for those 99% (or large subgroups of say 33% or so) to take that "get around" the difficult issues of tolerance and stuff like that.

Perhaps it would be good to have more explanation of what the entire hub is supposed to be/do? Well, what is it supposed to be/do (my idea is to be a place where different groups can exchange ideas and [perhaps] also be "moderated" and/or "rated" [by users] in some way -- this is obviously a quite complex undertaking, and so I'm not sure if it can be done [but I'd sure like to try ;]).

Another thing would be to simplify the number of categories -- e.g.:

1. support groups
2. friends groups (perhaps better than "adult" or "singles" -- at least right on the homepage?)
3. local community groups
4. interest groups
5. everything else

Might something like that be better?

:) nmw