LinkedIn’s New Surprise “Group Discussions”

I was thinking today that Linkedin.com's new features for Groups are a great idea. Except that the company did set the expectation those discussions would be a new feature with groups. So I am wondering if many people were unprepared to manage the new feature. Probably most people are happy with the new feature, but I wonder how many people asked the question,

"Hey, why didn't Linkedin.com give me the option to add the feature to the service!"

Apparently you do have the option to turn off the Discussions feature, though it appears there may be a bug. Philippe Ory wrote a comment on the LinkedIn blog post about the new Discussions feature in Groups.

"I was unable to change any of the group settings, including that particular one. LinkedIn seems to believe that I want to create a new group going by the same name of the existing one, and I am getting the following message "Sorry this group name is not available. Please choose a different one." for the Group Name field (which I have not tried to change!). Is it just me?" 

Shelia Etheride raised another good question on the same post,

“Any member can start any discussion and the group owner cannot moderate the topics. As a result people are starting discussions about connecting and finding jobs which have absolutely nothing to do with the group. Unless the group owner can moderate these groups will simply become another avenue for spamming and abuse. Is there a plan to allow the owners to moderate?”

 Good point about moderation, I am sure we will see more features from LinkedIn on Discussions over time.