As many of you know, we hosted our third ever Groups Moderator Town Hall event in the Dallas area in early March.

At these events, we give local moderators an opportunity to come together to meet and exchange ideas with other Groups owners and moderators in their area, meet members of the Yahoo! Groups team, and ask direct questions of the team in a panel discussion. The feedback and suggestions we hear at these events provides the team with yet another avenue to identify opportunities to make improvements to the Yahoo! Groups product.

To get a glimpse of the most recent event in the Dallas area, check out the photo-stream on Flickr.

At the end of this post (below my signature), you’ll also find a podcast highlighting portions of our very first Groups Moderator Town Hall event held on the Yahoo! Campus in Sunnyvale last October. In this podcast you can hear opening remarks delivered by Brad Garlinghouse, SVP of Communications & Communities (which includes Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and Flickr), followed by some fun trivia with Mike Speiser, VP of Yahoo! Communities, and a portion of a testimonial given by the owner of the FlyLadyMentors group and FlyLady herself, Marla Cilley.

* Because this podcast was taped in October, some of the details shared, specifically the numbers, have changed – and have increased significantly on all counts.

We’re planning the next Groups Moderator Town Hall in the Atlanta, Georgia area in May. We’ll post more details soon, until then, if you are located in the Atlanta area, or are simply interested in being notified of events planned in your area, please submit your details here so we know where to contact you. Our goal is to plan Town Hall events in different cities throughout the year because we want to hear from you too!

Best,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

 

 Groups Moderator Town Hall Snippet - Sunnyvale [7:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1218)

Some of you may have received or heard about an important notice sent to users regarding their Yahoo! Profile photo. This announcement seems to be generating some confusion that I hope to clear up.

The notice, a copy of which I have included below, was only sent to users who have a profile marked as adult at http://profiles.yahoo.com/YID.

Two things to make clear:

• Just the photos on adult profiles will be deleted on April 9^th, not the profile itself or a person’s Yahoo! ID
• Adult groups themselves, including their photos, will NOT be affected in any way.

In short, even if you completely ignore the notice, the worst that will happen is that your profile photo will disappear on April 9^th.

Notice that was sent out
Email title: An important notice about your Yahoo! Profiles photo

We’re making some changes that will affect one of your Yahoo! profiles. After April 9, 2008, mature content will not be permitted within Yahoo! Profiles.

In accordance with this new policy, users will no longer be able to designate an “adult profile,” and mature content will be removed.

The profile (http://profiles.yahoo.com/YID) for the Yahoo! ID YID is marked “adult.” The picture associated with this profile will be removed and deleted on April 9, 2008.

We encourage you to upload a new profile photo on that date that complies with the Yahoo! Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

For additional information or to learn how to get a copy of your photo before April 9, 2008, please visit our help pages.

Jami
Groups Community Manager

I am sure you will all be happy to learn that we’ve completed the test phase of the Related Groups feature. This means that “Related Groups” are currently no longer appearing in the right hand column of Groups emails.

The results are in
As mentioned in the original post on this topic, we were testing a concept that we believed would address a concern we have heard from Groups users, members specifically, that while they love the groups they are currently members of, it’s often very difficult to discover other relevant groups that they might also be interested in joining. As Leonard mentioned in his update to my original post, our goal with this test was to learn whether the feature is useful for Yahoo! Groups users. If we found that the feature was useful, we would want to invest more into it. If we found that it was not useful, we would want to remove it or improve it. The results are in and we found that the members who received “Related Groups” in their group emails did indeed discover other relevant groups that they were interested in joining. As a matter of fact, the member uptake of this feature far surpassed our expectations (meaning that an overwhelming number of Groups members subscribed to new groups they learned about in their group emails).

What does that mean?
Well, this means that we’ve validated our belief that this would be a great way for Groups users to discover new groups. This also means that we’ll be investing more into this feature. Before you get upset, please hear me out, there were some other learnings that I wish to share as well.

As we’ve assured all along, we have been reading all of the comments, feedback, and suggestions you’ve shared with us here on the blog, on the Groups Suggestion Board, on the Moderator Central Message Boards, and in the various groups about Groups. We are full aware of the concerns some of you have and the last thing we want to do is implement a feature that is contrary to your group guidelines or that would cause any unnecessary disruption. We realize that so many of you have invested a great deal of time, energy, and a devotion to your groups and we are extremely grateful for that.

Based on your feedback, here are some things that we will be changing in the release of this feature (which won’t be for some time, and we’ll give you advance notice):

• Provide a way for Groups owners and moderators opt out, allowing them to decide what will work for their group, or not
• Reconsider what we call this feature
• Further optimize how groups are selected to appear (attempt to make them more relevant)
• Explore options to allow Groups owners and moderators more granular (detailed) control
• Give you advance notice when we decide to re-launch this feature

Last but not least, the one thing I want to leave you with is that your constructive feedback is very valuable to us. While not everyone may agree, it is the responsibility of the Groups team to take the entire Groups community into consideration when thinking about new product features and solutions. This includes Groups owners and moderators as well as Groups members and in this case, we saw that group members found value in this feature based on the test results.

Thank you once again for your effort to share your thoughts with us!

Best,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

** Update: 3/25 1:18 PM PST – This issue has been resolved. Please note that you may experience a slight delay in receiving mail that was sent in the last few hours as the system catches up.**

We are aware that some Groups users may currently be experiencing site slowness when accessing the Groups site. Our engineering team is currently investigating this issue and working to resolve it as quickly as possible.

I’ll post an update as soon as I have one.

Thank you for your patience,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

The issue that was preventing some users from unsubscribing from a group via email has been resolved. We appreciate your patience while we isolated the problem (this issue had to do with ISP’s that were incorrectly changing the case of the “reply to” field on confirmations).

If you find that you are still experiencing this issue, please contact Customer Care.

Thanks and happy Friday – I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

Best,
Jami
Groups Community Manager

Hi all,

My name is Leonard and I am the Director of the Yahoo! Groups team. There has been a lot of discussion about the test we are running with the Related Groups content in emails. We are listening to your thoughts and wanted to update you on some of our current thinking. But first, some clarification about the feature.

The Related Groups feature is a test. In a test, our goal is to learn whether the feature is useful for Yahoo! Groups users. If the feature is useful, we would want to invest more into it. If we find it is not useful, we would want to remove it or improve it. So what are the results of the test so far? Well, it is still too early to get definitive results, however the current direction of the data shows that members are joining many more groups than ever before. With that said, let’s discuss some of the feedback we have heard:

1. Is anyone listening to my feedback? Yes, we are reading your messages and comments. However, if you want a direct line to us about this feature, we have provided a choice in the Groups Help area to submit issues you are seeing with the Related Groups feature It is particularly important to let us know if you are seeing a specific recommendation that is a problem for you, and why it is a problem, so that we can look into addressing the issue. Please only submit Related Groups commentary, as this goes to the product team and not customer service and so we are not staffed to respond to inquires not related to this feature via this link.
2. The name of the feature “Related Groups”. We received a number of proposals for different names for this feature. We definitely want users to understand what this list is. For this reason, we showed users how many common members existed between groups. We are trying to be as transparent as possible about how this works, so people can make an informed decision. If we find a name that makes everyone happy we would love to update the feature with it.
3. Concerns about privacy. We require a minimum number of common members between groups before we would show a related group. However, use the feedback form we mentioned above if you are seeing an issue.
4. Logic of the results. Prior to this feature, members within groups would sometimes ask others for recommendations, but the process was awkward. In this test, we tried to come up with a simpler way for members to identify groups they might also be interested in. Developing the best suggestions for groups is a never-ending process, and we are continuing to explore ways to improve this process. We’ll continue to track the results of this test (as well as your feedback), as our goal is to provide the Groups community with the best possible experience. This includes looking for ways to suggest groups with small memberships and making sure that the recommendations made are to healthy communities.
5. Ability to opt-out. While we don’t have a tool on the website that allows you to opt out of this test, we definitely intend to provide such a feature in the future. Based on the results of the test, we’ll develop a roadmap for these changes.

Everyone, thanks again for sharing your thoughts on this. We have a team of people here who are genuinely interested in building a product people will love. Let’s keep talking.

Best,
Leonard

Over the years we’ve received a great deal of feedback from Yahoo! Group members, that while they love the groups they are currently members of, it’s often very difficult for them to discover other relevant groups that they might also be interested in joining. In response to this feedback, the Yahoo! Groups team is testing a new feature that will make this process easier and surface recommended groups based on common members between groups. These recommendations will appear in the right hand column of Groups emails.

Here’s an example of what the new group emails will look like:

For example, if there are many common members between Minions of Evil Leonard and Feline_tamer, then the Feline_tamer group will be recommended to members of Minions of Evil Leonard. The goal is to help you connect with other people you share common interests with, so recommendations will only be made between groups that have members in common. All members within a group will see the same recommendations.

We feel that this new feature will be beneficial to the Yahoo! Groups community and we hope you agree. We’d love to get your feedback, please share by commenting below.

***UPDATE***
I see that many of you have questions and concerns over this new feature that we’re testing and I wanted to assure you that we’re reading through all of your comments. We can’t respond to each comment individually but instead will be reviewing the comments over the next few days and address them in a post next week. Your feedback is very valuable to us and we appreciate your effort to share your thoughts with us.

Thank you for your patience!

Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Why are you recommending groups to me that I am already a member of?
The recommendations are based at the group level, not at the individual member level. That is, we are only looking at groups that share members. Future enhancements of this feature will exclude your existing memberships.

These groups don’t have anything to do with my group. Why are you showing them to me?
Recommendations are made by looking at your group and finding other groups that share common members. If there is enough overlap between members, we will recommend the group. Future enhancements of this feature will include more relevant recommendations to you.

I don’t want my group to be recommended. Do I have a choice?
You can remove your group from the Yahoo Group directory to make it unlisted if you do not want it to appear in recommendations. However, we highly encourage you to stay listed as this will help interested members find you. Visit Groups Help for instructions on how to remove your group from the directory: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/ownmod/starting/starting-11.html

For those of you who have tested and provided us with feedback on the Groups Beta that we launched earlier this year, I wanted to share an update with you on where we are. We received a lot of really great and helpful feedback based on what you liked, and didn’t like, about the features and enhancements we were testing in the Groups Beta.

Below are some of the common themes in the feedback we heard:

• Many of you told us you really liked the ability to customize the homepage to make your groups more personalized (as well as the unlimited characters available to describe and set the tone for your groups).
• We also got a lot of positive feedback about the direction we are going with the moderation tools we tested in the beta and heard that they are a big time saver.
• At the same time, we also heard loud and clear from many of you about the concerns you had with the new design and that you don’t want a big change all at once, since that may be potentially disruptive to your groups (which is obviously not what we want).

Next Steps
We’re now going to take all of the feedback you have shared with us and the lessons we’ve learned and incorporate these things into the classic (or original) Groups product in an evolutionary way. In addition, since we’re no longer going to be doing further development on the current beta platform, we’re encouraging everyone who is currently using or testing the beta product to move back to the classic Groups product at their earliest convenience:

- To switch a Beta group back to a classic group, simply click the “Switch Back to Original Yahoo! Groups” link, which appears in the footer of every page of beta groups (if you’re the group owner).

- However, if your group was created as a beta group, this link does not appear. We will provide instructions on how to switch one of these groups to a classic group in the near future, stay tuned.

Thanks for taking the time to share your input on the Groups Beta!!

Best,
Yahoo! Groups Team