Hi everyone; it has been some time since we’ve announced what we have planned for the Yahoo! Groups community, so I thought I’d outline our plans for the coming year.
Over the past few months, the Groups Team has been hard at work strengthening and improving our existing systems, while simultaneously innovating and developing new features and options.
What’s new now…
So far, we have released the following to the site:
An entirely new search and browse system. This new system fixes a number of known issues, makes search updates much faster, and improves the sort order when you browse for groups (many enhancements related to this release were highlighted in the recent post called Yahoo! Groups: How long does it really take ).
- A new “Groups Lab” initiative which consists of a team of folks who work to create features within Groups that can be customized by moderators to fit the specific needs of their group. The People Map is an example of a feature that was developed by this team.
- A new technology platform for the site (not quite fully released). We are changing every page of the site but doing so in a way that won’t disrupt your existing experience. This new platform will allow us to release features and fix bugs much faster than ever before.
What’s to come…
But the exciting news is what is to come in the future. Here is a short list of the features we plan to unveil to you in the coming year:
- New ways for people to share information with each other within your groups: Product Reviews, Services Directory, Wanted Boards, Address Book, Event Planner, and many more.
- Message Boards 2.0: Improving the Message experience within groups in many different ways (e.g. giving members the opportunity to choose which discussions they want to subscribe to, making it easier for moderators to highlight the best content, etc.).
- Ability to charge an optional subscription fee for membership to your groups (we have no plans to get in the middle of the transaction, just make it easy for you to make sure members are paying).
- Photo Album 2.0: An entirely new photo system with massive group storage and stunningly large photos.
- The return of archived attachments: We will process attachments and store them on your group, if you choose this option.
- For our non-English speakers, the ability to select the language you want to view the site in and better handling of all types of character sets.
We’ll also work to address some of the top suggestions from the Groups Suggestion Board , such as allowing members to adopt abandoned groups, increase the number of characters in group descriptions, enabling moderators to send and reject messages from the owner address, and many more. (Look for a blog post in the near future with more details).
The entire team is excited to finally deliver on several of the features we’ve heard many of you ask for. Thanks for being such loyal members of the Yahoo! Groups community!
Best,
Leonard
Director, Yahoo! Groups
It’s been more than six months since this message was published and we have been experiencing problems with foreign characters. We write mostly in Spanish in one of my groups and we have been receiving giberish instead of what the member originally. I contacted customer service and was redirected to this page but I don’t find a deadline or a commitment to solvethis issue. When could we expect this to be solved? Thanks
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I wish that the emails did not have all of the old post strung out and repeated every time someone post. Can there not be an intelligent threading or something in the emails so we do not have to dig through screen after screen of the same repeated post every time someone post via email? This is what I hate about Yahoo Groups and wish all of my groups went to a true forum software instead of the Yahoo Groups because of the awful emails sent from the groups. I do not need to see the post being replied to and every other post replied to before that one many time over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over – hopefully you get the point.
From the past 1 week or so we getting numerous problems with Yahoo Message Approval system. Some of the problems are -
* The group moderators approves the messages but still they will NEVER APPEAR in the group! (most of the times)
* The members post the messages, and those messages will appear in the pending messages section, BUT WITHOUT THEIR CONTENTS!!
If the members cannot expect that what they posted will not appear in the group, if moderators cannot be sure that the mail they approve will appear in the group (instead those mails just vanish into thin air!) – the what use with all the other useless features?!!
Of course Yahoo Group is the BEST. Sure. But the recent problems shows that the recent updates to the Yahoo Groups has affected even the basic functionalities of the group (message posting and approval) thus totally buggy!!!
Our group (Ancient_Indian_Astrology) was a moderated group with 2500+ members. But due the recent bugs, we were FORCED to make it an unmoderatated group to avoid missing of messages posted (during posting as well as during approval) !!! Please…..Please……do something to prevent this collapse of an excellent service yahoo provides – i.e, Yahoo Groups. Please make them dependable and robust as it was a week ago.
“Member profiles” (you call it Group Profiles) is great. At first I didn’t realize that it included the people map.
The subscription fee option will be very useful.
I would like to see even MORE flexibility in scheduling repeating events in Calendar. For example, I might want to post a reminder to repeat “every 8 days”.
Thanks!
This is a wonderful idea
kandy
Quote: “Ability to charge an optional subscription fee for membership to your groups (we have no plans to get in the middle of the transaction, just make it easy for you to make sure members are paying).”
Please notify me when this dream becomes a reality.
WE REALLY NEED AN RSVP FEATURE!!!! It would really help us plan our group events!!!
How about adressing the Grouply Problem?
AMEN to the meetup functionality. My group needs the RSVP abilities too!
Happy to hear improvements are in the works. I haven’t seen any mention of RSS, so I’ll mention it. We need to be able to subscribe to our groups’ posts via RSS.
Thank you for all the work. Would it be possible to attach pictures to the Birthday Reminders?
I am very excited to hear of changes to the group calendar. Our group would love to have rsvp capabilites, where we can click on the event on the calendar, and respond whether or not we can make it, make a comment if we need to, and allow all the other members to see who is and isn’t attending. I am also excited about the message board changes, that will allow me to highlight topics. Thank you on your continued dedication to improving the Yahoo Groups experience.
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When is the attachment archiving coming back? You state on July 14 that you’re working on it and that was 6 weeks ago. You gave us a 15 MB attachment size, but my group has capped attachment sending size at 7.5 MB to accommodate our members on dial-up and we will not allow a full 15 MB attachment through until the archiving is back so our dial-up members can switch to the Daily Digest setting and pick and chose what attachments they really want. Until the archiving comes back, we really can’t, in fairness to all our members, make full use of the 15 MB attachment size.
I agree with Wendy. If this is going to be a blog for spam artists rather than one which is for useful suggestions AND REPLIES BY THE YAHOO TEAM then it is getting to the point of marking Yahoo Groups Blog as spam.
OK Leonard or another member of the groups team…….PLEASE RESPOND.
Is anyone reading this any more? Can’t you admin people remove the spam postings? Not to mention, ban the last poster and others from posting?
Not seeing any replies from yahoo and seeing the off-topic postings make me think this is not a forum that yahoo is paying attention to any more, which may be why the useful postings have dropped off – I see there’s been nothing since the spam one three days ago.
What would make my day and sure a few others is when you go into archives and want to delate them , it’s a pain to have to do a page at a time why can’t a months worth be done .
Ithe having to click on each attacment to view it takes alot of time why can’t they come full size to see with out all the hassel like other mail accounts do. All you see is a tiny pic or what ever is sent, and have to click one at a time to see it the normal size. Work on the things already on the mail not add new stuff no one will use.
My problem is Databases — can we please have more!!!
I run a charity knitting group and need lots of databases to keep track of charities/donations/monthly projects etc. Because of the limited number I have been forced have off-group databases which totally confuse many of my members most of whom are up in years and not very computer literate.
HELP!!!
Hello,
Just want to say thank you, Keep up the good work guys.
Good Luck!
I agree that the People Map might not be a useful feature for everybody, but for some groups that have a Geographic base it comes in handy, for example I have members in 2-3 geographic regions and I need to track how many in which so that we can customise our meet-ups to the regions having a reasonable member volume.
Top Improvements Needed in Yahoo! Groups:
1. Meetup like feature that allows you to set up a group meeting and keep track of people who (a) accept, (b) decline or (c) maybe. This would make Yahoo Groups very competitive with “meetup” or “invite” only sites. Right now it is hard to deal with multiple posts and keeping track who accepted/declined.
2. Wiki like interface for databases, i.e. nicer interface with more rich text possible for DBs so that valuable information stored in Databases is easily searchable, viewable and presentable on the front page, not burried a few layers below. We place high importance to the DBs and have several hundred entries in some of them. Would also be nice to run stats, totals and filters, on the different table columns.
3. Expand on the DB & link features, merging them and bringing them an end user interface that is viewable on the main page, along with the messages. Simple example: If I add a link in the DB it would be nice to have it clickable. A deduping featuer would also be beneficial.
4. A customisable front/home site with widget like features to place important things up front and in your users’ face; e.g. calendar, it is not getting the attention it should where it is. If I could add it to the front page, everbody would see it and interact. Along these lines it would also be nice to control what is publicly viewable and what not, e.g. might want to show part of DB contents to potential members as an apetiser, but keep some crucial information private until members sign up. Such as a catalog or directory, where you keep contact details hidden. This helps to expose the Yahoo groups to potential members as more than just a chat group with rich features.
I hope there’s an option where we can archive messages faster and even new messages. An option also where you can stop the message from sending(hmmm…) And also some sort of titles or menu of titles displayed on the right side..just like the blog interface.
Thanks…
So when do we expect the new features for 2008 to take effect? Tnx
Although I like the idea of making everything better, I just have one problem. I can no longer get onto Yahoo Groups! I get as far as “Sign-in”, and I get an “Internet Explorer can not assess the webpage. What do I do now?
anything new on abandoned groups?
Wendy, thanks for your response. I didn’t notice any options regarding listing messages when I sent that note, though now I clearly see that I have a choice of listing by individual message or by topic. I’m really not sure if it was a problem with Yahoo Groups or with me … but it’s resolved, and that’s what matters!
dear moderator
i created a group about my adored and beloved Freddie Mercury but i dont know how to use and manage it
.can you hep me and give me the correct instructions ? i want so strongly give him a tribute for years and years.
Thanks and kisses.