Can I ask you what's going on with User Groups? that's the thing that has me most confused

It's something I saw on forums a lot in the early 2010s. It's a bit like ranks in a Discord server but there are typically way less and rarer.

Sometimes users would get to own a group. It wouldn't really mean anything but sometimes they got it with forum credits (that's why there's an unused credits feature here) and they could invite their friends, have a custom banner under their avatar and get their own forum.

It's a bit of a weird concept now that everyone communicates basically just on Discord but a lot of this site's design is inspired by those kinds of MyBB forums back in that day.