Groups on Kitazo: shared spaces around a theme

What a group is

A group is a page built around one theme: a genre, a format, a kind of story. It holds three things — a shared list of films and series that people think fit the theme, a ranking of those titles, and a board of what members are saying about them.

A group is not a private room. Anyone signed in can open it and read it; to add titles you have to follow it. What makes it a community is who follows it: the ranking is built only from the ratings its followers gave.

You reach groups from Search, under Groups. The list shows the live groups in alphabetical order, up to fifty of them, and you can search it by name. Groups still waiting for review are not in that list.

Joining a group

Joining is one tap on Follow, from the list or from the group's own page. There is no request to send and nothing to wait for: you are in straight away, the follower count moves, and the group's updates start reaching you. Tapping again unfollows, just as immediately.

Following does two things. The group's activity starts appearing in the For You feed under the Groups filter, and your ratings start counting towards that group's ranking.

The approval step is for new groups, not for members

If the group you want doesn't exist, ask for it with Request a group in the group list; a verified email is needed. You give it a name — English is the base name and has to be 3 to 60 characters, and you can add an Italian name too — and, if you want, a few starter titles.

Before the request is filed, Kitazo looks for groups that already carry the same name, or that share a word of more than two letters with it, among the ones already live and the ones already waiting. If it finds any, it shows them to you first. You can look, change your mind, or send the request anyway.

From there a moderator decides. While it waits, the group exists but is invisible: only you and the moderators can open it. Approval sends you a notification and puts the group live with your starter titles already inside. A rejection also sends you a notification, with the moderator's explanation when they wrote one.

Requesting a group does not make you its owner. Groups have no owner. Once a group is live, every member edits it on the same terms.

Who can add titles

Whoever follows the group. If you don't follow it yet, follow first: without the follow the button accepts nothing. Then open the group and use Add a title. For a subgroup, following the parent group is enough.

Tapping a suggestion doesn't add it, it stages it. When you're done, Review lists everything you staged so you can drop whatever you tapped by mistake, and Confirm adds the lot in one go. A title can only be in a group once; adding one that is already there changes nothing.

A title you add to a subgroup is added to its parent group as well.

How the suggestions are chosen

With the search box empty, the picker suggests your own library: the films you have watched, the series you have finished, and the titles on your watchlist. Anything already in the group is kept out of that list, so what you see is what you could actually add.

A moderator can attach genres to a group — up to twenty, from the fixed genre vocabulary Kitazo uses for films and series. When a group carries genres, those suggestions narrow to the titles in your library that carry one of them: a horror group offers you your horror, not your whole history. A bar above the list names the genres it is filtering on. Show all widens it back to your entire library, Filter puts the narrowing back. The genres are also shown on the group page, so you can see what the group is meant to hold before you add anything.

Searching in that box ignores the filter. It searches everything, with your own matching titles listed first and the wider results under them. A title already in the group still comes back in a search, marked Already in the group and not selectable — so you can see that it is there instead of wondering why it went missing.

The ranking

Ranking is the group's first tab. Titles are ordered by the average rating the group's own members gave them in Kitazo, not by the app-wide average. A niche title the community loves can sit above a title with a better general score.

A film counts a member's star rating. A series counts the average of that member's season ratings, and only once they have finished every season — a half-watched series is not a verdict. When two titles have the same average, the one more members rated goes first.

A title really enters the ranking once enough members have rated it. The threshold is ten per cent of the group's followers, never fewer than two and never more than five. Until a title reaches it, the page says Provisional ranking; titles below the threshold queue behind, marked as to be confirmed, and after them the ones with no votes at all. The filters at the top, Ranking, To rate and Not seen, show you everything, the titles you have seen but not rated yet, and the ones you haven't seen.

Next to a film you have seen but not rated, the ranking puts Rate it: pick the stars and Send rating, without leaving the group. A series takes you to its own page instead with Open and rate, since the rating goes on the seasons rather than the whole show. Anyone not following the group sees Follow to make your votes count.

What's on the board

The Board tab is the group's feed: newest first, twenty-five entries at a time, more as you scroll. Two kinds of thing land there.

• Titles added to the group, each with the person who added it. From that card you can rate the title if you have seen it, save it to your watchlist if you haven't, or report it.
• Public comments left on a feed entry about one of the group's titles. You never cross-post by hand: comment publicly under someone's post about a title and your comment is attached to every live group that holds it. Comments written straight onto a title's own page stay on that page — those do not travel to the groups.

Comments you posted to friends only never appear here. Neither do posts from private accounts other than your own, or anything from someone you have blocked. A comment about a title you haven't watched stays blurred until you tap it.

Reporting a title that doesn't belong

There are two ways in. On the Board, the card for an added title has a Report button. On the Ranking, press and hold the row. Both ask you to confirm first. You need a verified email address, and you can report the same title in the same group only once.

Reporting removes nothing by itself, and nothing is hidden while the report waits. You get a notification saying it arrived and that a moderator will look at it.

Moderators see one entry per reported title per group, with how many people reported it and who they were, most-reported first. They have two options. Remove takes the title out of that group: it leaves the list, the ranking and the title count, and it does not send you a message — you simply find it gone. Dismiss keeps it, and everyone who reported it is told the title was judged to fit the group and stays in it.

The same title can live in other groups. A removal only affects the group it was reported in.

Subgroups, and what muting does

A live group can have subgroups, one level deep — there are no subgroups of subgroups. They are created on request and go through the same moderator approval; the app has no button yet to ask for one, so for now you ask by writing to support@kitazo.app. A subgroup can launch with no titles at all.

You do not follow a subgroup. Following the parent already subscribes you to all of them, which is why a subgroup's page shows Mute where a group shows Follow. Muting is how you opt out of one subgroup: you stop being notified when someone adds a title there. You keep following the parent group, the subgroup's page stays open to you, and you can unmute whenever you like. The mute is yours alone — nobody else sees it.

There is no mute for a top-level group. If you want one to stop reaching you, unfollow it.

Who can do what

• Anyone signed in: follow and unfollow a group, mute and unmute a subgroup, save the titles in the ranking to a watchlist.
• Anyone following the group: add titles.
• Anyone with a verified email: request a group, rate a title, comment on it, and report it as not belonging to a group. Rating also asks that you have actually seen it: a film has to be marked watched, and a season needs at least one watched episode behind it.
• Moderators only: approve or reject a group request, attach genres to a group, remove a reported title or dismiss the report.
• Nobody: there is no group owner and no per-group admin. Asking for a group grants no powers over it, and once a title is added it only leaves a group through the report queue.