Ohshits, four pages 'o posts in a night, fgj. Lolz at the bickering, if you lot weren't adults and/or great in justice, we'd have our first official drama already,
. Good job.
Lessee. First, I'm all up for a peas and gravy forum, peas are good and so is gravy, so I guess the combination is worthy of its own section. I'll set it up posthaste.
I think that part of the problem with the ACF teams is / was that they were almost all an entire forum in themselves - almost every team (as far as I know) had its own general chat, spam, art, serios business, etc sections, which eventually led to at least the two largest teams to completely separate from ACF and start their own forum / site. That's certainly not something we'll want in this case.
Speaking of wanting in this case, as is described in the first page (post?) of this thread, the forums aren't yet as large to support teams properly. I'd vote against starting up 'general' (i.e. non-specific themed, non-project, and/or 'hidden' teams) teams until the membercount has passed a thousand members - back on ye 'CF, the teams were only added once there were what, 5000 members? I can't remember, I do know that I joined when there were 'just' 1400 members back in '04 (I think), and it took quite some time after that until teams were started. But that's years ago, I could be wrong.
I think that 'project teams' or (maybe) 'theme teams' could work, especially the former (I think the latter's topics could just go in the public sections), but only under two conditions: Their primary activity would have to be public, and the addition of new members should be according to that members' skill and offered services to the team, and not by the current team members' opinions and/or favoritisms. Either a non-team associated (group of) member(s) should handle team applications, or joining a team would depend on a certain amount of prerequisites, such as translating skills (to be tested with either a test or earlier work, to be checked by existing translators), join date and/or forum activity, warning level (i.e. misbehaving members won't get allowed into a team or could get expelled), etc.
Also, I've been using the i.e. thingy for ages without actually being sure it's applicable in the places where I use it.
Back to the teams themselves and their transparency, as I said I'd like to see the majority of a team's activity to be publically viewable and actively moderated (also because of being publically viewable, would give off the wrong signals if rules weren't enforced as strictly inside a team as outside of it, elitism etc), with only a hidden section if that section contains sensitive information, such as personal stuff, team competition discussions, etc.
Transparency is what we're aiming for on TLS right now as well. There's a hidden staff section for (gasp!) staff, but I've seriously added the note that only the really sensitive discussions (the stuff about specific members, n00dz, that kinda stuff) should go there. More general topics that concern the entire forum (and its members) such as rules, new staff, the site's technical / financial / management issues, etc should go into the feedback and suggestions section, for everyone to view and add their feedback to. One of the poor points of yon CF was the secrecy, the giant barrier between (some?) staff and the members, the lack of transparency in what's being done with the site, the idea that everyone's just winging it without having any solid idea of what they're doing.
Back there, the Member Representatives was a step in the right direction and an adequate substitute for complete transparency, but it was still elitist and it didn't actually work, regardless of several months of intense and constructive discussions. I want to prevent that by doing (almost) everything in public, for great justice.
Back on track now, teams in the general sense seems a matter for the uncertain future when the amount of members and activity create an impersonal atmosphere on the forums. I don't see that happening anywhere soon, with for example the clubs, the specific interests of each member, etc, but when it does, feel free to bring this subject up again. From the various opinions I've read in this thread, it seems a pretty bad idea to have the same team structure as back on ACF (i.e. opaque micro-forums with an extra helping of drama), so I'd be all up for keeping the majority of team activity in one or several general (= publically viewable) sections. The notion of the current members of a team deciding which other members get to join the team also seems pretty poor to me, since it'll create a 'you can only join if we already like you'-atmosphere, which kinda defeats the purpose of teams.
Teams in the project sense would be an excellent idea for the site right now. With the Compilation being pretty dried out, now would be the time to concentrate on work on what exists (such as ultimania's, the stories, etc) in somewhat larger projects, concentrate the focus of the talents of the members on here into constructive products, and thus create exclusive content on / for this site.
For great justice, of course.
I guess I'm in favor of all the teams and/or with the addition of new teams making a come back. 
:-X
