This is the first in a series of blog posts intended to introduce you to the makeover of Yahoo! Groups. You can consider these posts an in-depth tour of the service’s updated look and feel.

Today, we want to address more of the rumors that have been circulating about the remodel. Subsequent posts will explore particular features in depth.

This remodel incorporates a lot of feedback we have heard from the Yahoo! Groups community as a whole. We have taken an iterative approach so that you can benefit from the updates as soon as they are ready; this will also allow us to improve features more quickly.

We’ve tackled Chat, Messages, Photos, Members, and the home page in this release. Other features will be addressed on an on-going basis. Although your group’s most-used features may not be addressed in this release, they soon will be.

What information is shown on the Updates stream on the home page of my group?

The Updates stream includes only activity within your group. Any activity outside of your groups will not be displayed in the Updates stream in this release.

What is changing with my group’s privacy options during the remodel?

Privacy options will continue to function exactly as they did before.

Learn more about when email address will be displayed and how to change what information is shown in your group.

What is changing with moderation and other permissions?

All of your current permissions will continue to function as they did before.

If you are a moderator, you will continue to be notified of any pending messages, members, and photos via email. When there are pending messages, members, or photos, you as a moderator will see a pending notification when you first come to your group.

What is changing with message archives?

Message archives will be available to members if that option has been selected for the group. If not, then the archives will not be available. This also holds true for public archives.

Learn more about archive settings.

What is changing with email?

There were no changes to the email system in this release. That means, you will continue to receive emails as you did before.

Learn more about email.

What happened to the web features (e.g. Links, Databases) that my group uses?

These features are still available to those groups that have turned them on and appear in the left navigation bar.

In fact, if you use any applications (e.g. People Map, Birthdays, Group Profile, RSVP), they will now appear in the left navigation bar as well.

Learn more about the web-only features.

What happened to features such as Message History and Reply-to Sender?

Unfortunately, some features didn’t make it into this release.

Reply-to Sender: Reply-to Sender as a reply setting from the web interface will be released very soon. None of the groups that have this option set as the default will be migrated to the remodel until this feature is available. Please note that you can continue to reply to sender via email as you were able to before.

Message History: This feature will be brought back soon in a slightly different form in the near future.

What is happening to my Adult groups?

Adult groups will continue be supported as before.

One difference from Adult groups and other groups that you will notice is that the Chat feature is not supported for Adult groups. Learn more about why Chat is not supported for Adult groups.

When will the Chat feature be enabled for my group?

Chat will be enabled for your group once your group has been converted to the new look and feel.

If you are a moderator, you can enable or disable Chat. Simply click on the Management tab in the left navigation bar.

You will see an alert notifying you that the management settings haven’t yet been remodeled.

Just click the “Continue” button and you will see the management settings you are familiar with.

To change the Chat setting:

- Under the “Groups Settings” section, click on “Web Tools.”

- Click on the “Edit” link to the right of “Web Tools.”

- Scroll to the bottom of the page and enable or disable Chat. Click on “Save Changes” to update your group’s settings.

When will my group be converted to the new look and feel?

The new look and feel is being slowly rolled out across all Yahoo! Groups in the U.S.  You may notice that your group switches back and forth between versions as the rollout progresses.

If you use a local version (non-U.S.) version of Yahoo! Groups, the same look and feel will be available to you soon, within the next several weeks.

Next in the series: Group Descriptions.

Hi, everyone:

I hope you had a wonderful Labor Day weekend. I can tell you that a good number of our engineers spent their weekend fixing the issues with photo uploads and photo viewing, and we are happy to announce that we believe the problems have been resolved. Please let us know if you are still seeing problems.

Rumor has it that I posted an email on some groups announcing the upcoming shutdown of Yahoo! Groups. Please rest assured that these are just rumors! Not only is Yahoo! Groups not going to be shutting down, but we are also enhancing our features to improve your user experience. Also, don’t forget, I just joined the team and hope to work with you for a long time. ☺

Another misconception out there is that you will be losing all of your archived data. This is absolutely untrue. What seems to have caused some confusion out there is the fact that we plan to make some changes to the Message History grid that has been appearing on the front page of each group. While it is true that our new design won’t initially include the History Grid, our product team is working on a bringing a redesigned version of it back shortly.

Finally I wanted to address Ed K and others who are telling us to focus on fixing the current bugs instead of focusing on evolving. Our goal with this first release of Yahoo! Groups is to embark on a path of more frequent product updates. This means that we can’t cover everything at once, so we focused on the things that were most important to you, to enable you to communicate and share with your group members. The redesign has at the heart of its focus the improvement of current sporadic issues.

Thank you for your patience, support, and understanding during this transitional period.

Hi Yahoo! Groups community,

You have continued to report photo uploading and photo viewing issues to us, and many of you kindly forwarded screenshots, so we went back to the engineers for further investigation.

The engineers spent a huge amount of time on photos this week, including checking all the groups that contacted us through the blog and Customer Care. However, they were unable to replicate the photo problems, and when you can’t replicate the problem, it’s difficult to fix.

When some users can’t see images but others can, the problem is often caching, which is why we’ve been recommending clearing your cache. But the fact that so many of you continue to have photo troubles suggests that the problem goes deeper than caching.

The good news is that our engineers have a new theory and are making some adjustments that we hope will address the issue. Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience, and we promise to keep you updated on our progress.

Feel free to use the comment section to indicate whether the new changes have helped you view and upload photos or whether you are still experiencing problems.

Have a great three-day weekend, everyone.

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