Forum Suggestion
I would like to see Groups enabled on the forums. This has been discussed on this post previously: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/14378/forum-suggestion-more-features-and-a-purpose-for-levels
You can see the possibilities of it listed here: https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/70-groups-and-events
I have been told by several agents that a more secure posting area, and even better, more local area would make them more comfortable. I'd suggest a test pilot (like vanilla suggests) of APAC, EMEA, AMER of each faction to start, and then depending on how it goes, expand the program to smaller sections of the globe. How would people prefer this be implemented and group managers be chosen, if NIA decided to go w/ this?
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Couple of points:
Factional Groups
We saw every time a large factional group was created in past times, that people would use a second account to read that group's posts, making "secure" as insecure as the old '[secure]' tag in Faction COMM. Even without people making second accounts, plenty of Agents around the world or even just a region are friendly enough with others of the other faction to "pass gossip" and make any sort of security irrelevant.
I would be in agreement with having regional Public groups, without any factional grouping, but I'd be more granular, based on language or similar culture. Just taking APAC as an example, making public forums for:
Factional groups at that scale wouldn't be much better than the public groups we already have now.
Private Groups
The key 'Groups' part of the post linked was the ability for player organizations to make their own group within the Ingress community, similarly to how G+ ran with Communities.
I think User Created Private Groups would have a big effect on bringing the community back to a central point and encouraging people to visit the Ingress forums far more often.
People would still maintain the chat groups that they already have, in Telegram, Discord etc, just like they did in Discord, but things like events and long form posts would once again have a private location that most players are aware of.
Some pilot groups could be mirrors of some of the bigger, existing groups that were on G+, as well as some groups for, uh, groups that are known by Niantic and which have a low risk of going off the rails. As per my post you linked, groups for Swag, Operation Essex (which was originally a group created by Niantic for the purpose of the story anyway) and one or two silly fun groups would be a nice start. Niantic should obviously be the main group manager in each of them, but groups like Essex should have the same managers as the admins on TG (which, to be transparent, would also includes me).