INTRODUCTION TO RALLY GROUPS:

On June 26, 2013, Pot Farm added a way for players to find more posts to collect from! After starting or joining a Rally (game group), when you share a seed in game, it also posts a second link to your rally page. These new, additional links can only be claimed by members of your Rally. Your friends will still be able to collect from your wall posts. This will not affect that in any way.

LIMITS:

The information presented here about limits is how the developers explained this feature to me (and posted on their wall).

This feature does NOT increase our daily limit on things we could collect, but the additional posts have their own claim limits. That means more posts to click on which means a better chance to max out on our daily limits.

NOTE: For the first few months of rallies, we were able to collect 50 more posts every day. However, the extra limits from Rallies WAS A BUG. Rallies were NOT meant to increase daily limits!

Limits for newsfeed and rallies both reset at 10pm pacific time every day.

This should be especially helpful to people who don't have hundreds or thousands of friends. But even for people with lots of friends, it makes it easier to max out.

RALLIES PAGE:

Click the MEGAPHONE on the left side of the game to access the RALLIES page.

CREATING A GROUP:

Creating a Rally creates a new Facebook group page with YOU as the administrator. You can only belong to one Rally at a time. If you want to change Rallies, you need to leave and start/join a different one (see below).

When setting up a group, I suggest making it CLOSED so only the group members can see the posts there.

Game groups are a little different than regular groups, but for those new to groups, you can see Facebook Group Info here.

INVITE FRIENDS:

After you've created a group, click INVITE and select some friends to send invites to. These invites will show up under their gift page under a new Rallies tab there.

JOINING A GROUP:

Rather than starting your own group, you can choose to join someone elses. Clicking JOIN will show you a random list of some of your friends group. Click Rally Info next to one to see who is in it.

If someone invites you to their group, you'll find their invite on the gift page. Click the envelope, then RALLIES to see your invites. There you can accept or decline. Right now, it doesn't look like you can get more info on the group from there. To get info on the group, try this... Take note of the group name. Then see info on SEARCH below to find the group and see who is in it.

INVITES:

Click the ENVELOPE (gifts) and then the RALLIES tab to check your invites. From there, you can accept or decline. Again, you can only belong to one group.

SHARING TO A GROUP:

After joining or starting a group, sharing to it is completely automatic. When you share something to your wall, a second post (with separate claim limits) is posted to the group you're in.

AUTO-PUBLISH REQUIRED: If you do not see your posts in the groups, no one else will either. Right now, it looks like you need to turn autopublishing on to have posts go to the rally. (Click PUBLISH in the game banner and accept the request for permission.) That will be a problem for people currently using seed share groups (because they can't get the popup to lock the post to themeselves.) I confirmed this with the devs and was told... "Right now it looks like it requires autopublish, but that wasn't our intention, so we'll look at getting around that."

Even with autopublish on, there are some posts that will give you the Facebook share popup. If you include a comment when you share something through the game, that comment only shows up on your wall post. The post in the Rally (group) will say simply "Yo Rallie Dudes!". If you have autopublish on and you get the Facebook share popup, and then lock posts (to yourself only, or certain friends), that only affects your wall posts. Posts will still show up normally in your rally.

GROUP PAGE:

From the Rallies page, click GROUP PAGE to visit your group.

COLLECTING FROM A GROUP:

Go to the group and click on the HEADERS of the posts you want to collect from. There is no "GROOVY" or "Collect a Mystery Seed" link. You can only collect from links posted in a group you belong to. Copying and pasting links to others is pointless. No one outside of the group can collect them.

LEAVING A GROUP:

You can leave a group after joining. It's best to leave a group from within the game. If you leave the group itself, you'll still need to leave from within the game in order to be open to join (or start) another. From the Rallies page (megaphone icon), click LEAVE GROUP. After leaving a group, reload the game and you'll be out.

DISBANDING A GROUP YOU CREATED:

From the Rallies page (megaphone icon), click DISBAND GROUP. If you disband your group, the entire Facebook group will be deleted. Reload the game and your group will be gone and you'll be able to create or join a different group.

TRACKING YOUR GROUP:

From the Rallies page, you can see the name of your group and it's status (open or closed). You can also see the names, levels, and numbers of shares by each group member.

GLOBAL: CHECKING OUT OTHER GROUPS:

Under the global tab of the Rallies page, you can see the top 10 rallies. (It's unclear yet what this is based on.) It tells you how many members the group has and it looks like it will tell you their total shares. Click on Rally Info for a group and see more about the group, it's members. You can even request an invite there.

SEARCH:

Search allows you to search for a group, but you need to know it's name. If you want friends to join your group, you can give them the name of the group and they can search for it and request an invite.

MISCELLANEOUS RALLY INFO:

Just like any Facebook group, you can go directly to the group and post comments, pictures, etc. You can either go there through Facebook, or click GROUP PAGE from the Rallies page.

GROUP TIP: The group admin can "pin" one post to the top of the group. I recommend starting a discussion thread (perhaps with a picture), then pinning that to the top of the group. That way, you'll have a place for people to post in the group that won't get lost among the hundreds of other posts.

There are no rejection notices if your request or invite is rejected.

To start out, Pot Farm is using this feature for share posts. They plan on adding other features in the future. They liked my idea about posting mooches to these groups as well, so that might be a good way to get the building stuff we need now that there's no more gifting from my toolbar. Hopefully that will be added some day soon.

Again, this simply ADDS another set of posts to help people reach their daily limits. Basically, there will be twice as many pizza posts to collect mystery seeds from, twice as many 20x woodstock posts to collect 9x woodstock from, etc. Then, hopefully, they'll be able to add mooching within the groups to give another avenue to get more building supplies.

Rally groups will not affect nor limit any other Facebook groups you already belong to. The only exception to that is an issue I posted above. (It appears that you may need to turn autopublishing on to have posts go to the rally. I'm looking for more details now. If so, that will be a problem for people currently using seed share groups (because they wouldn't get the popup to lock the post to themeselves.))