Yahoo! Groups Blog

Yahoo! Groups created before April 2012 had the option for owners and moderators to bulk-add members through the “Add member” option.  Unless such users explicitly link the email address used to add them to the group, to their Yahoo! profile, they cannot access the group via web. Many of these users remain email-only users of these groups.

Some of the users are surprised to see mails from a Y! Group that they have not chosen to join, but have been “added to”. This has been a cause for concern and many user complaints, as this provides an option to add member to a group without users explicitly choosing to join the group.

We are removing  this option with immediate effect. This might cause some inconvenience to moderators that may be using the ‘Add member’ option. The change is done in response to customer concerns on potential abuse. The “Invite members” option is available as always, with a reasonable  limit on number of users that can be invited in a 24 hour period.

– Yahoo! Groups Product Team

Update on the Systems Upgrade ( 11:30 pm PST  16th Jan 2013)

We have completed delivery of millions of messages that were queued up today !

System Upgrade is now complete. We regret the delayed delivery of your messages during this upgrade and thank you once again for the patience. We look forward to offering a faster Yahoo! Groups experience !

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Update on the Systems Upgrade ( 3:30 pm PST  16th Jan 2013)

Following the upgrades we’ve been experiencing delays in queued  emails getting delivered. Our engineers have been working to get the issue resolved and we expect the mail queues to be cleared in the next 4 to 6 hours. Thank you, for your patience !

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Update on the Systems Upgrade ( 7 am PST  16th Jan 2013)

We’ve successfully upgraded most of the systems, we do have a few pending tasks that would be completed over the next few hours. Groups website is working as usual. The queued up emails are being sent out.

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We’re upgrading our systems and Yahoo! Groups will be unavailable for a few hours on the night of January 15th 6:30 pm Pacific Standard Time. Emails sent to your groups will be delivered late during this time. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this planned downtime.

We would be posting updates as we approach the planned upgrade date and during the upgrade as well.

– Yahoo! Groups product team

Last year, our team has been hard at work, improving the Yahoo! Groups experience. You may have noticed improved response time to issues reported, streamlining of the user experience and improvements in site performance. This year, we would continue this effort with increased investment in the Yahoo! Groups product.  Looking forward to a great year ahead, Wish you all a happy new year 2013 !

– Yahoo! Groups Product Team

Yahoo! is happy to announce that our Yahoo! Help Community has officially moved to Yahoo! Answers for Groups. We want to thank all of our valued Yahoo! Customers for making our P2P Help Community a huge success. With success comes greater numbers, which is why we decided to make the move.

Yahoo! Answers  has a vibrant community with some of the best ‘Top Contributors’ in their field. Making the transition has been seamless and the Answers Community has welcomed us with open arms, allowing you to ask your questions to the widest Yahoo! Products audience in the world.

By searching the previously asked questions within Yahoo! Answers, you may find a solution has already been posted. You’ll also be able to ask your own questions, receiving answers from top contributors in the community, as well as our Yahoo! moderators. If you post answers to other members’ questions you can earn reputation points and be recognized for your contributions.

Over the next few months we’ll begin moderating additional Yahoo! product categories in Yahoo! Answers as well. We’ll announce and clearly identify which product categories have top contributors and Yahoo! moderators actively participating.

See you on Yahoo! Answers!

Sincerely,

Yahoo! Help Community Managers

Latest Update :

Hot topics is now live !  (we had blogged about this feature earlier). Hot topics are posts  that have attracted a lot of replies from members of your group in the recent past.  Topics that have at least 3 replies are considered. The topics are listed by recency, more recent topics on top. We’re hoping users would like this feature and use it  to easily identify  topics that might interest them.

Hot topics is available as a filtering option under the messages section. Users can now view messages, topics or hot topics. Do try it and let us have your feedback on this new feature.

– Yahoo! Groups product team

Update : the systems upgrade has been postponed see blog post.

We’re upgrading our systems and Yahoo! Groups will be unavailable for a few hours on the night of November 18th Pacific Standard Time. Emails sent to your groups will be delivered late during this time. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this planned downtime.

We would be posting updates as we approach the planned upgrade date and during the upgrade as well.

– Yahoo! Groups product team

We recently introduced the My Groups drop down menu, yesterday we rolled out the settings button as well. These changes would help users to easily switch between groups that they are members of, and also change their settings easily. In addition to the changes to the header area, we’ve made changes to the messages read navigation elements. We’ve introduced visible filters view by ‘topic’ or by ‘message’ and have made changes to navigation links while reading a message. Do let us know your feedback on these changes.

Next we plan to launch ‘hot topics’ filter – topics posted in the recent past, that have attracted a lot of replies from the members of your group. This would help users catch-up on interesting discussions that they might have missed.

- Yahoo! Groups Product team

Users could order their list of  groups on  http://groups.yahoo.com/ordergroups . There were problems with the drag and drop re-ordering experience. Today, we rolled out a fix and it is now working fine. The order set by the user would be used to order the list of groups on the “My groups” drop-down as well as on Yahoo! Groups  home page for signed-in users.

In addition,  we’ve optimized the “My Groups” drop down performance. Check it out,  it loads instantaneously. The drop-down now has a link to the “Order your groups” page, where a user can change the ordering of groups easily.

- Yahoo! Groups product team