There have been several posts inquiring how members should work with 3rd party websites; below are some clarifications based on the Groups Guidelines that every Y! user should adhere to when dealing with 3rd party sites (please note that the Groups Guidelines are tied to Yahoo’s general Terms of Service and sho uld be followed by all Groups users and moderators):
- If you are considering providing your Y! username and password to a 3rd party site which stores that information on their own site, please carefully consider the risks before doing so. Giving access to a 3rd party can be very unsafe as the 3rd party site can access your Yahoo account as if it was you accessing your own account. For example, they could access your address book and send emails to your friends, change your account settings, or gain access to your personal information. Under Section 5 of the Yahoo! Terms of Service “You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of the password and account and are fully responsible for all activities that occur under your password or account.” For more information please also refer to section 5 of Yahoo’s Terms of Service .
- Group Moderators have the responsibility and the right to enforce their own membership guidelines for their group. The guidelines can relate to how group members deal with or interact with 3rd party websites. If a member is part of a 3rd party website in which the site accesses the group content using the member’s login information and/or the user’s email and then makes this content available to other users, this behavior could put them at risk of having their membership to the group revoked by the moderator or for having their Yahoo! account closed entirely for a TOS violation. Moderators have the right to protect their group’s content along with the privacy of their members and can and should enforce this at their individual group level. For more information, please refer to section 11 of the Groups Guidelines , section 12 of Yahoo’s Terms of Service and privacy/security information .
Groups owners and moderators should take every opportunity to protect their group members’ privacy and integrity of the Groups community and as such, Yahoo’s Terms of Service and Groups Guidelines should be referred to when dealing with all situations including 3rd party websites.
Thank you,
Groups Team
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how i can stop to see the all posted message in group by non member.
In answer to the previous post, “Isn’t the point of groups to disseminate information to its members?” The answer is IT DEPENDS. Every group owner has an INTENDED MISSION for which the group was designed. Advertising OTHER NETWORKING sites is NOT PART OF MY GROUP’S MISSION. Frankly, my members join for a specific reason NOT RELATED to the mission of Grouply, Winster, or these other networking sites. I resent having a group that I am created, managed and take responsibility for used for the purposes of furthering the interests of ANOTHER GROUP. I resent having the membership that I attract by the stated mission of my group USED as fodder to harvest and feed the membership of ANOTHER GROUP.
If my members wish to share networking sites privately amongst themselves, FINE. That is their prerogative, I have no problem with that. But don’t use my group has a public forum to do that. Each group owner should definitely maintain the mission of their group, and if that mission does not include advocating or giving voice to these social networking sites, then so be it.
Members who wish to be in a group that does that, should create their own group and allow that.
As a group owner where we already have anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000 postings PER MONTH, here is why I object to my membership using Grouply, Winster, or some of these other networking websites that pirate members’ address books to spam my group:
How has that affected my Plantswap group? I canNOT know whether or not a spam message to join these networking websites actually came from our member or whether or not it came from Winster, Grouply or these other websites, USING the member’s name (as that is how it is posted to our group).
Because of this, whenever we receive such posts, we
automatically have put such members on Moderated status,
until it is shown to us that such member is not
intentionally posting spam in our group.
We have had to institute such measures in order to keep the
number of extraenous and bothersome
posts to a minimum, in
consideration of the more than 1300 members who have no
interest in reading spam, as we commonly already have
anywhere from over 3000 to 7000 posts per month as it is.
Spam messages of this type that do not pertain to the mission
of our group, which is trading, only add to the volume of extraseneous
posts in the group, and to the irritation of
most of our membership who are here for the purpose of
discussing their gardens, as well as for trading plants,
seeds, and cuttings.
I haven’t gotten email replies when trying the opt out for my groups.
Did that Change?
A question for all you group owners:
If you took a survey of your users/members and found that say, 75% of them were OK with grouply, would you excommunicate those members?
Isn’t the point of groups to disseminate information to its members? And if the users want to better manage their flow of information, do you think that denying them that ability will endear you to them? Especially by using fear of the unknown, which has become the go-to tool for getting what you want these days.
I get the feeling that most of the group owners here regard themselves as (mostly) benevolent dictators of their groups, where being in charge is more important than anything else.
My 2 cents.
any suggestions how to make our egroup not accessible to anybody? once you type the name of our egroup, it appears in yahoo , google and other search engines and they can view all of the discussions in our group. please help. thanks a lot.
allan
Yahoo!Groups must take full responsibility for this.
It is Yahoo’s responsibility to provide internet security for its groups and members.
Yahoo, please act now!
Set up a control panel for group owners/moderators to deny 3rd party access.
This can be done with DOMAIN BLACKLISTING and ENTITY BLACKLISTING.
Yahoo knows who the entities are: web archives and pirates like Grouply.
To anybody still reading this: Grouply is not a scam!
It’s a wholly legitimate business with investors that are high-profile in the Tech world. Just cos you haven’t heard of these people doesn’t mean that they’re unimportant — I had no idea who Paris Hilton was until long after she was “old hat”.
New technology like this won’t steal your soul. I find it far better stream-lined to use Grouply to read my Yahoo!Groups messages — but I belong to over 80 groups. If you belong to only a few groups, then you probably won’t get much use out of Grouply. What Grouply primarily does is basically consolidate all of one’s groups into either a “smart digest” or consolidate all groups’ web-interface into a single “message board” format — you don’t have to go to different URl’s to read the different messages, you don’t have to “junk up” your Inbox with hundreds of daily messages — and it has all sorts of other features, such as bookmarking posts for later reference, tagging threads, star ratings, all of the “Special announcement” posts are on one page while all the general discussion is on another.
And if you don’t want to invite everybody in your groups, here’s the kicker — in the sign-up-and-invite process, just click the button that says “Skip”, and you’ll avoid inviting people altogether! How novel!
Is there anything I can do to get Grouply completely out of my system?
stop this junk from coming to my mail box
I ended up joining Grouply yesterday, but I cancelled my account shortly after! Grouply’s nothing but a scam! I’m glad I stopped my account before any damage was done! Nobody should get into Grouply at all! I admit I did, and I almost got ruined! If you’re into it, get out of it! If not, stay away from it! I saved myself a lot of controversy, and I believe you should, too!