Hi, everyone:

Thank you for your immediate feedback.

It’s great to see how passionate you are about Yahoo! Groups. We realize change is never easy, and of course, all of us will face some challenges in this transition. While not everyone seems happy with the new design, we appreciate your candid feedback and want to send a special thank-you to members like Denver, Dreadaxe, Melissa Antoine, and Jac, who are taking a step back, recognizing the need for our changes, and offering their support. Your encouraging words mean a great deal to us.

Yahoo! Groups was one of the very first online social networks, and although our features were robust enough to provide support for our users’ needs when we started, the way we interact online has changed. We’ve worked hard to evolve Yahoo! Groups and incorporate modernized features that will help you communicate with and manage your online communities more effectively.  Our top priority is to stabilize the site, and continue to intake your feedback as we make decisions for the upcoming releases.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the changes actually are, so let me take a moment to clarify a few things.

1. Once we’ve remodeled all of our groups, there will no longer be an option to switch back and forth between versions. We want to move forward with our modern look and enhanced features, and continue to introduce new improvements on an ongoing basis.

2. Email Changes? There won’t be any major changes in email communication, you will still be able to receive messages through your email, and nothing will change in that front.

3. It is true that you will no longer have a Rich Text editor in message formats when posting via the Web. This decision was reached after the continuing requests from our community to simplify creating and reading messages.

4. Some of you have been asking for a central email service routed to all group owner addresses, to notify them of upcoming changes. We actually have such a group in place, Moderator Central, which I welcome you to join:

4. We do not have any plans for making Yahoo! Groups a paid service.

Our Customer Care Team has created a helpful page with a complete list of changes in functionality that you might want to read through.

Now let me take a moment and address some each of your individual comments:

• Terry & James & Linda: Navigating content areas in a left-side control area has emerged as a common design practice. Additionally, with everything going on in your groups, making the main view a summary of all these activities was a natural way to ensure members can stay up to date. If you’re a visitor or not a logged in member, you’ll still be able to view the group description and group photo as before. If you’re a group member who is logged in, all you’ll have to do is click the icon to the right of your group’s name.
• Will Davis: Which features have been taken away from you? Could you clarify so I can address your concerns?
• Mike Clemens & Jan D: You’ll still have the option to see the whole message and its thread at one time. You’ll also have the option to sort your messages by date/time, as well as by subject. You’ll have both options, and this will make things less confusing.

We’ll continue to read your input diligently as we move forward with the remodeling. Once again, thank you for your loyalty over the past years. Please understand it’s not our intention to drive away your groups or members, but we do need to address the needs of our community as a whole, and to do so, we have to move forward with the times and update our systems and designs to reflect the evolving needs of our members.

We’re sure you’ll be pleased once you actually have a chance to see the new look and play around with it.

Layla & the Yahoo! Groups team

It’s finally time to share the start of our makeover with you!

Starting today in the US version of Yahoo! Groups, we’re releasing the first of several updates.

• One place to do it all: Stay up-to-date and never a miss a beat with the new homepage.

• Simplified posting: Easily post messages and photos to your group.

• Keep up with the conversation: Read and respond to entire conversations effortlessly.

• Intuitive, faster photo sharing: Share, upload, and view tons of photos in a snap.

• Instantly get in touch: Chat with fellow group members without leaving your group. (18 and older only)

You can learn more about these changes here.

You’ll notice that some areas still look the same. We’ve tackled the most popular “rooms” first and will be remodeling the others in the coming months. If you haven’t seen the changes yet, don’t worry – we are slowly rolling it out and they’ll be available in your group soon.

If you use a local version (non-U.S.) version of Groups, the same remodel will be available to you within the next few weeks.

You might notice that your Group might switch between versions as we complete all of the group migrations.

Stay tuned to the blog for the latest news as we continue our renovation. And we’re eager to hear your feedback, both on the suggestions board and here on the blog. Thank again for your continued support!

The Yahoo! Groups team

Updates:  It’s rare but possible that you may still experience issues uploading or viewing photos. If so, this is due to caching at your Internet service provider and could last as long as 30 days. One short-term solution is to try uploading again. It should work the second time (it did for me).  Search problems are fixed for sure, if you are still having issues, please send me an email to yahoogroups@yahoo-inc. with the screen shot and describe in details what is happening.   Thank you

Hi, everyone:

I wanted to start off by thanking you for all of your patience as we try to resolve all existing issues and prepare for our remodeling.

You might remember that Yahoo! Groups was one of the very first online social networks, and our features were robust enough to provide continued support for our users’ needs. However, the Internet has evolved, and our original system is in clear need of upgrading to support your needs and the increasing number of groups on our platform. We are working with our user base and engineering team to evolve Yahoo! Groups, fix the existing re-occurring issues, and incorporate features that will help you communicate and manage your online communities more effectively. This has been quite a challenge for our team (most of us are new) and we have to deal with programming code and servers that are over 10 years old. It has taken our team a lot of work to dig to the root of the problems and fix issues without having access to the original programmers or system documentation.

Our goal is to make Yahoo! Groups completely bug-free and to embark on a path of more frequent product updates. We can’t cover everything at once, so we are focused on the things that are most important to you.

We made a change to Message Search to improve its stability and speed. Default Message Search will now search message title and body text only. Author search will still be supported using Advanced Search.

Our apologies for any problems you experienced in uploading or viewing photos. Our engineers have assured me that all of those problems have been resolved, except for one: When you upload new photos, the oldest photos still show up first. The new photos uploaded go toward the end of the album, so double-check your entire album before determining that your photos have not been uploaded.

That said, I know some of you are continuing to report other problems. Unfortunately, our technical team has been unable to replicate these issues, which makes it difficult for them to resolve the problem. They do, however, have one suggestion and one request:

Try clearing your cache and then reloading the page where you’re having problems viewing the photos. We believe the problems that folks are continuing to have since Friday may be caused by a cached error page.

If that doesn’t work, please send an email to customer care with as much detail as you can provide about the problem you’re seeing. Please let us know the exact steps you are taking that are not working, and provide as much detail as possible about the error messages (or screens) you’re receiving. Screenshots of these error messages would be particularly helpful (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=how+to+take+a+screenshot&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz35).

Thanks so much for your help. We sincerely apologize for the hassle.

Layla & The Yahoo! Groups team.

Hello everyone on Yahoo! Groups:

As some of you have noticed, over the weekend we experienced some server issues that impacted about 1/8 of our groups. These issues included:

*Messages that were queued up but not delivered
*Message search was still not working for a few of our groups

Thanks to the diligent members who brought this to my attention via our Blog and Moderator Central, I was able to alert our team, who worked hard over the weekend to eliminate all issues related to message delays.

Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience — sometimes servers have minds of their own! Our team is well aware of the issues regarding Message Search, and we have continued to put it on the top of our priority list. Thank you for your continuous support, understanding, and feedback in this process.

Some of you may have experienced intermittent message search issues beginning yesterday and continuing today

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. Fortunately, our technical team has been able to identify the problem and is already taking the necessary steps to fix the issue as soon as possible.

I have been reading all of your helpful comments on my previous blog, and a special thank-you to Karen W, tunic, Sam, and Matt for bringing the search issue to our attention. It is dedicated members like them who keep us on our toes.

I will keep you updated with the latest on this. Once again, thank you for your patience as we get ready for our remodeling.

We’re excited to share our progress with you!

But, first, we want to thank you for your continued support and feedback over the years. We’ve been hard at work addressing your concerns: launching email updates, revamping message search, fighting spam, and addressing other long-standing group member and moderator requests.

Now, we’ve turned our attention to a full-on makeover. After all, we know that the way that you stay in touch with your friends and family has changed over the last 10 years – it’s time that we remodel too.

Soon, we will be unveiling a fresh design and new features to help you share and communicate with the people who matter to you most. This will be the first of many improvements in the coming months.

We’re still putting on the finishing touches…stay tuned!

The Yahoo! Groups team

Hello, everyone:

Update: The maintenance finished on schedule and all systems should be functioning normally with one exception: some users may be experiencing intermittent errors on pages with CAPTHA.  In other words attempts to join groups, create groups, or add new members to existing groups may fail.  Our team is working towards resolving this issue. In the interim if you try more than once, you should be able to successfully complete these flows.

If you experience any other unusual issues, please contact Customer Care.

I wanted to give you a heads-up. On Monday, August 9 from 2-5pm Pacific Standard time, (22:00-01:00 GMT)Yahoo! Groups will conduct some tests to comply with our annual Business Continuity Planning Certification (BCP).

BCP ensures that, should we suffer a major technical outage, we can minimize the impact on your groups by quickly switching to a fully operational copy of the site in another location.

Per your suggestions and comments on our previous blog posts, I wanted to inform you ahead of time, as there may be a brief period of errors on your group’s homepage. Some groups might also experience message-posting delays for up to 2-3 hours.

There is a possibility that messages in a few groups will be queued up and delivered at a later time, but don’t worry our team is working hard to decrease this possibility.

We expect the maintenance to be complete and all systems performing normally again by 5 pm.

Do you have some great ideas on how to improve Yahoo! Groups? Join us on Answers for a chance to win 100 bonus points, and guess what? Your idea might just make it!

Cheers
Layla

Hi, my name is Katherine Sexton. I am originally from Peru. I am a wife, a mother, a business owner, an entrepreneur, eldest daughter to two amazing parents, sister to six wonderful siblings, and member to several Yahoo! Groups.

With all the hats that I wear, I’ve had to be resourceful and proactive in teaching myself how to run a business and a household, while taking care of my parents, raising a child, and doing my part to managing our finances.

I have achieved these skills largely by being active in online communities and discussion forums, primarily through Yahoo! Groups. Now more than ever people are sharing and collaborating online to solve problems and help each other, and there is a heart to Yahoo! Groups that I have not been able to find elsewhere online.

Spending time on sites like Yahoo! Groups is how I learned to create a budget, balance a checkbook, and understand 401(k) pretax benefits. I love saving money using Group on.

I love Finance and joining Yahoo! Groups has been so rewarding to me. Among some of the Yahoo! Groups I have joined are Better Budgeting, Debtsteps, Budget Homemaking, and Clever Homemaker. Thanks to the “specialized groups by category” featured on Yahoo Groups, it’s easy for me to browse within the Finance category and search the subcategories of Small Business, Financial Professional, and Consumer and Budget Management Since each group listing has their own description, it’s quick and easy to figure out what the particular group is about.

With Yahoo! Groups, I don’t feel alone. It is nice to be reminded that you are not the only one battling different challenges in life or wanting to become a more knowledgeable person.

I have learned a lot since receiving my bachelor’s in business administration and I would love a chance to give back to a community in need and pass along the tips and techniques from my journey in overcoming debt, for not only me or my household, but for my parents. I can also help with the finances of raising a baby. A big thanks to Yahoo! Groups for giving me this opportunity!

I have to say, Yahoo! Groups is not perfect and I have been looking for ways to express my needs, so I was really glad to see Layla’s posts and tweets asking us to blog and share our opinions. Layla, you asked for it, here it goes:

Since Yahoo! Groups is so popular–we really need a ‘chat window’ or ‘live chat’ which will boost participation from members. A way to improve photo sharing would also be appreciated.

Thank you Layla and Yahoo! Groups team for providing me the opportunity to be a Guest Blogger.  Please feel free to email me directly or send me your favorite Groups on Yahoo! I am also looking forward to going back to work, so if you hear of any great opportunities please let me know.

Thank you Katherine for a wonderful blog. Send us your story if you like to be featured on our blog. We are also looking for Guest Bloggers for our Delicious Blog, share your delicious moments with us.

For those of you who are interested in blogging in general, there is a great opportunity at Debt Blogger for WomansDay.com WomansDay.com is looking for a new female blogger who is working to get herself out of debt to blog on a daily basis for The Daily WD. She would write about her journey to becoming financially stable again. The ideal age range of this blogger is 35-60. If interested, submit 3 sample blog posts (150-300 words) as well as your name, age and a little information about yourself Here.  The rate is $50 per blog post.  Check out the WomansDay.com blogs.

More information about womansday.com:
Designed as a forum to report on the changing needs of today’s woman. Coverage goes beyond recipes to include fashion, health, home decorating, crafts, beauty and fitness. Provides inspiration and information to cover every aspect of a woman’s life. Content supplies possible guidelines for women out in the field and the contemporary housewife.

Some of you may have experienced intermittent mail delivery issues beginning on Friday until Monday evening Pacific Time.    Our sincere apologies if you had a delay Yahoo! Groups emails during this period. Fortunately our technical team has been able to identify the problem and has already taken the necessary steps to fix the issue.  Things have stabilized and mail delivery is back to normal. We appreciate your patience in this process and are grateful to those of you who reached out to us  to notify us of the problem.

I have been reading all of your helpful comments on my previous blog, and I apologize for not being able to respond to each of you individually. Please rest assured that your message has come across loud and clear. We realize that Yahoo! Groups needs to make some significant changes to meet your expectations, and our team is working diligently towards this goal.

Meanwhile I invite you to continue with the great feedback on our Suggestion Board.

Greetings Yahoo! Groups Community:

Since I joined Yahoo!, I have been extremely busy reading your wonderful ideas on the suggestion board and making sure the right people hear them. We were able to implement a few suggestions already. For example, John had some great ideas on how to update our help page to provide more information about editing membership, and we immediately made the changes here.

In fact, these suggestions kept me too busy to connect to a colleague with whom I had made several failed attempts to make a lunch date, until finally both our calendars opened up on July 21. He’s Belgian, and because Belgium is the world’s biggest producer of comics per capita, his email reply about lunch included some of his patriotic humor:

“Layla—Thank you for requesting to have lunch with me on the Belgian national holiday [July 21], rather than the French national holiday —Pieter” (July 14, Bastille Day, had indeed been one of our failed attempts for lunch.)

His email reminded me how I had met him in the first place: A friend had met him at Southbaybelgians,  a Yahoo! Group dedicated to getting together with fellow Belgians to network. Although, if you want my opinion, they mostly meet to drink beer. After all, Belgium makes over 800 different beers, and each person in the country drinks an average of 150 liters of beer per year.

I figured Belgium’s National Day definitely deserved some coverage, and it would be fun to see what other Belgium-related Yahoo! Groups are out there. But first, what do we really know about the land of chocolate, French fries, mussels, and waffles?

Photo by historic.brussels

I could give you an overview with all the right figures — but isn’t that what Jimmy Donal Wales and Larry Sanger created Wikipedia for?

Instead, I’ll focus on one of my favorite topics: food.

Belgium produces 220,000 tons of chocolate per year—but looking at the average Belgian tells me they don’t eat it all. Brussels’s national airport is the world’s biggest chocolate-selling point. (That would be an airport I definitely would not mind a long layover at.)  A Belgian by the name of Adolphe Quetlet came up with the Body Mass Index (BMI), which is commonly used to determine a person’s ideal weight. (Probably his way of dealing with all the chocolate and beer intake.)

Proportionally, Belgium has one of the lowest number of McDonald’s restaurants in the developed world. It has seven times fewer McDonald’s than the U.S. and two times fewer than France. Can we assume this is a health-conscious nation? Well, Brussels sprouts really do originate in Belgium and have grown there for over 400 years, but this doesn’t stop the Belgians from visiting their own fast food chain: Quick.

So how many Belgians do we have involved with Yahoo! Groups? Currently we have over 2,000 groups that show up in search results for Belgium-related groups.