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.

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.

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.

allan

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.

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!