I know it's tough to actually have a private group chat on AFF (not so much tough as it is impossible seeing as you couldn't actually do it). If there was less than 5 people I had to PM, I just copy and pasted the same thing to each of them. If more than that, I just said "screw it, it's not that important". Well you can finally PM a group of your friends now through the PM section of your profile. Just click on the envelope icon and look for the "Group PM" tab. Type in the usernames of your friends that you want to put in a group, label the group, then create it. Once you make the group, go into the conversation you just made and then send a message. That's all there is to it.

This feature is restricted to your friends only mostly because a) we don't want spam in our inboxes and b) we don't want creepy PMs either.

Participants who no longer want (or never wanted to be) in the conversation, can also remove themselves right at the bottom of the conversation page under "Participants". And just like in real life, if a friend annoys you, just un-friend them and they can't try to invite you to their group chat anymore (they can still come to your house in real life so this is not an exact one-to-one).

Group PMs also only work on the new layout. The new layout was built just to make these sorts of features easier to do which was a major reason for the new layout in the first place. I'm sure some of you have noticed that the fanfic cover images only show up on the new layout and that's for similar reasons. The old layout can't support the new stuff and some of the new features just error out because the old layout code, by definition, is old.

Anyway, hope this new feature helps out some of you and have a good weekend!