Our group, Rheumatoid Arthritis Support, is not easy to find anymore (new memberships have decreased dramatically over the last few months). I myself have tried searches for “rheumatoid arthritis” and “rheumatoid arthritis support” and for other terms related to our description with disappointing results. Many other groups which only tangentially deal with rheumatoid arthritis appear before ours, despite the fact that our group is large and active and deals primarily with rheumatoid arthritis.

Perhaps more weight could be given to the title of the group?

At the very least, I would like to be able to add a new category for rheumatoid arthritis under Diseases and Conditions. I have requested this via other channels, but it has not been done.

Thank you!

Recently, using the “Search for Other Groups” function again, I
discovered that, entering [ ESL ], the first group listed, esl_about,
while it had 3344 members, had not had a single post in 8 *years* (that is, since November 2000).

The third group on the list, engidioms, appears to be getting almost
nothing but SPAM as messages.

The sixth group on the list, italy-tefl_esl, announces it has moved to a new server, and has had no posts since 2001.

The eleventh group, esl.jobs, has not had a post since 2004.

I run a number of groups. One of them, TESLJob, is #12. That’s
reasonable; it has 512 members (by the way, it still shows 501 members,
which hasn’t been the membership for several months – How often is that
type of information updated?) and posts average around 30/month.

However, another of my groups, MedicalESL, is listed as #379. I could
understand it being listed between 75-100; it has 120 members and posts
only run around 10 per month. However, ranking ahead of it in the
search are many groups with under 10 people and very few posts. This seems very strange. (And, I notice, listed in or near MedicalESL are other groups that appear to warrant higher ranking on the list.)

Examples of groups that rank about MedicalESL:
clarkston_night_ESL –9 members, no posts since 2005 (rank: 78)
duke_esl_certificate_program –6 members, a total of 4 posts to the
list, and the last of those was in February 2007 (rank: 79)
esl-khabbaz –5 members, only one post ever sent to the list, in June
2007 (rank: 81)

I could go on (and on and on and on).

On Oct 2, I conducted an experiment: I changed my group settings to “Membership requires approval” [where the applicant has to provide a written reason on the join page]. My group almost immediately [literally, within minutes] jumped to 4th spot. I suppose that if I eliminated all e-mail attachments and set all members on moderated status, I would achieve first place, albeit at the expense of moderator & member enjoyment.

The new ranking system appears to be biased toward spam security. Based on my “experiment”, it would appear that “Membership requires approval” is the most highly weighted factor in the ranking algorithm and confirms my conclusion in August. Having the list archives viewable only to members, denial of e-mail attachments, and moderation of all messages would also promote a group’s rank. In contrast, group size and activity do not seem to be factors in the ranking algorithm. In other words, the new system is designed for Yahoo’s convenience [ie., with respect to message management, server load, & dispute resolution] and not upon merit [ie., to reward popular, active groups].

What does it take to get my group listed in the first spot? I’d like to see it there for a month or so. Please.

Secondly, partially basing the search ranking on number of members and activity could be bias against new and lesser known groups which could very well be more relevant and on topic. With the present algorithm, the group with more member/activity will get a more prominent ranking even if the relevance is lower, a lot of the activity are just irrelevant chitchat (even if moderated). A more relevant group with fewer members end up at the bottom of the list and possibly may not be found by potentially new members, thus, exacerbating the problem of few memberships, and consequently, fewer activity.

In short, the present algorithm favors groups which are already big, and puts newer, smaller but more relevant groups at the bottom where they’ll be hardly found by people who might actually be looking for them.

you should put the old ranking back to stop this non sense

regards
Nubia
owner Nubia_group