Why I haven't been publishing content on Gather lately

Many of you have notied that I haven't really been posting as much content on Gather lately, and I wanted to share my reasons for this:

1. There's a lot of personal stuff going on in my life right now, and I haven't had as much time--this is something I'll probably blog about on my Blogger blog.
2. Most importantly, I think, is that it takes me much, much longer to select the groups that I wish to publish content to than to actually create the content in the first place.

Many, many moons ago, I published an article with a suggestion on how to make group management on Gather easier for us. There were some comments and responses I received from Gather staff saying that the enhancements to group management were actually planned and in the works, to be released in early 2008.

It's almost mid-2008, and I'm still waiting for these enhancements to come through.

So Gather, when will the suggestions I made on group management be implemented? Soon, please?

To recap, the suggestions I made on group management were to provide a way to group groups. When I originally wrote the article, I think I belonged to around 100 or so groups. Now I belong to almost 500.

So for instance, I could have a "folder" where all of my "post anything" groups are listed. (I think the "post anything" groups serve a purpose -- they expose one's content to a wider variety of individuals. It isn't often that I, myself, will go to content posted in a post anything-type group; however, I know many people on here do do so and if it helps gain exposure for my content, all the better!)  If I click on the folder, I should be able to "select all" of the groups within that folder.

The same would hold true for my technology groups, my photo groups, my writing groups, my LGBTQ groups, my science groups, my local/New York groups, etc. Most of my groups can, more or less, be categorized into different folders. Or perhaps even multiple folders. Or, perhaps "tagging" groups could be used with the current system, so I could do a "search" on a particular tag.

For all of this to happen, though, a "select all" function needs to be implemented, and soon! Even if I were to not consciously select which groups I wanted to publish to, it would still take nearly 20 minutes to click on all of the groups in my groups list, as we have to click on them one by one.

Currently, it's taking me approximately 45 minutes to go through my groups list and select (add-in) the ones I want to publish to, and leave out the ones I don't. If I were able to select groups of groups, it would take me only a few moments, no matter how many groups I belonged to, especially if there were a checkbox next to the "folder" of groups that allowed one to select all of the groups contained in that folder.

Meh, enough ranting ... what do you folks think about this?

Oh, and please ... no comments about the upgrade/downgrade/however you consider the recent changes--those comments WILL be removed.

For a concrete example, I started writing this article 12 minutes ago. It's now 6:20 and I'm going to start selecting groups to publish this article to. I'll post my ending time, and you can all see for yourself how many groups I've selected to publish this article to. OK, my ending time is 6:56, which means that it took me 36 minutes to select the groups I want this article published to from among my list of groups that I belong to. Total time to actually write the article: around 14 minutes. Total time to post this article to Gather.com: 50 minutes -- way too long!