Invite Limit Changes
As you may have noticed, earlier this week the number of people you can invite per day dropped to 50 people. This was done in an effort to combat spam and reduce system load (the email delays some of you saw last week and this week were a side effect of people abusing the invite system).
It is important to note that while the invitation limit has been lowered, it does NOT mean that only 50 people can join your group. Additionally, if you want to encourage more than 50 people at a time to join, you can still send them an email directing them to either:
- Visit your group home page @ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GROUPNAME and click the Join This Group button.
- Go directly to your Join Page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GROUPNAME/join
- Send email to your group subscribe address: GROUPNAME-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Note: In all three cases make sure to replace "GROUPNAME" with the actual name of your group (e.g. moderatorcentral-subscribe@yahoogroups.com)
While we know that this can be frustrating for people looking to start a large group quickly, we are currently working on a new feature that will prevent measures like this in the future. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on future developments here.
Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager
jay vinton said,
May 1, 2009 @ 6:10 pm
thank you for the update Melissa.
the more feedback from you guys the better.
it really helps us to hear whats going on from you guys, rather than have yahoo groups feel like a black hole.
oth said,
May 1, 2009 @ 6:13 pm
Melissa,
Are you saying that the message delays experienced by all Groups for more than a week were the result of some managers over-inviting members to their Groups? Nothing else?
Gordon said,
May 1, 2009 @ 7:01 pm
Yes, the invite abuse was the root cause. Can’t and won’t go into the details, but it caused downstream problems in our systems that resulted in the delays.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about a few moderators sending a few too many invites, but about spammers who were creating tens of thousands of groups and using them to send tens of millions of invites.
Also, just to head off any questions, the “invite limit” of 50 is different (and separate) from the “add limit” (which is still set back to 10, again because of abuse).
- Gordon
Yahoo! Groups
Crystal said,
May 1, 2009 @ 7:34 pm
Wow, other than when a group is just getting started I can’t imagine anyone needing to send out so many invites.
All the other groups I belong to usually the people knew each other from other message boards and didn’t need to send out invites because the creation of the group was already being discussed.
I did all of my invites through my personal email or post the link up on my websites. If people want to join they will.
Glad to hear that there will be a damper on the spammers. Thank you Yahoo!!!
Terry said,
May 2, 2009 @ 12:20 am
I just noticed the number of people I can
ban a day is 2000,
an increase from 200 .
Was this change made at the same time ?
I can now go crazy banning spammers, lol
Thanks this change will definitely help in the
case of numerical spammers,where it can be
useful to predict the sequence of addresses
and ban them ahead of time .
Slawek said,
May 2, 2009 @ 3:02 am
Great, maybe now all these g-damn porn spam invitations to some adult groups will stop
MK said,
May 2, 2009 @ 9:27 am
good going yahoo!!
help said,
May 2, 2009 @ 9:36 am
I might be crazy but when I click on the membership link, I no longer see an “Invite new members” button anywhere. Help. I’d still like to invite new members (way less than 50 though).
Melissa Daniels said,
May 2, 2009 @ 11:10 pm
@help,
If you’re still seeing this issue, please report it to Customer Care so we can further investigate the issue. You can use this link to go straight to the help form: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/general.html
-Melissa
Judith Stein said,
May 3, 2009 @ 7:19 am
MELISSA–any update on fixing the Search function? In my groups, it’s still not showing anything after March 19.
Phil Stephensen-Payne said,
May 5, 2009 @ 6:06 am
While I agree with Crystal that “other than when a group is just getting started I can’t imagine anyone needing to send out so many invites”, there IS a need to send out many invites when a group IS getting started.
I was at an industry conference last month where a lot of concern was raised by the participants about “lack of communication” and, as a result, I set up four groups for peer-to-peer, closed, discussions, having checked first that there would be no problem inviting all the relevant delegates.
Now that they are set to roll, I suddenly find myself unable to issue the invitations (probably 1500 in total) which suddenly makes the whole endeavour relatively unworkable. 50 members might be fine for hobbyist groups but not for professional forums.
Please contact me offline so that we can find a way to resolve this before I have to abandon the project and go elsewhere.
aNTHONY WILL said,
May 5, 2009 @ 8:59 am
i AM LOOKING TO START A SMALL GROUP ABOUT THE LOS aNGELES PUNK SCENE CALLED SoCal PUNX. ANY ADVICE FOR SOMEONE WHOI IS NOT COMPUTER SAVVY I ALREADY HAVE APPROXIMATELY 250 POTENTIAL MEMBERS. THANK YOU handy
jay vinton said,
May 5, 2009 @ 10:50 am
With regard to all of the reports about email bodies not making it through to the yahoo groups anymore.
It seems to me that this is a bug on yahoo’s part related to their new attachments changes.
It used to work for all of the users until yahoo made the attachments change.
To tell users that html emails which used to be treated as body and not attachments are now to be considered attachments, and that it is up to the users to figure out how to work around this change in yahoo’s behavior by switching to sending plain text emails, is misplacing the blame and driving away users by failing to continue to provide a basic service, the proper handling of html email.
Yahoo should figure out how to implement the new attachments feature, which I very much want to see implemented, without messing up standard html email processing.
Us users who read digests and web only group email, very much need the new attachments feature, but not at the price of losing standard html email processing.
Cynthia H. said,
May 5, 2009 @ 5:49 pm
My groups (both the ones I moderate and those to which I simply belong) STILL will not show any Search results more recent than mid-March.
To repeat an earlier post, When will the Search function be “fixed” or the groups “migrated”?
studfinda said,
May 5, 2009 @ 10:40 pm
i get an error 999 message when i try to post to lots of groups, is that a built in thing?
Aparana Chauhan said,
May 6, 2009 @ 11:15 am
Its great if invitation limit has been lowered, at least no spamming…….
Judith Stein said,
May 6, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
MELISSA–haven’t yet seen a response to my question about whether there are any updates on when the search function will be fixed.
Melissa Daniels said,
May 8, 2009 @ 9:55 am
@Judith Stein,
Both posts regarding the message search feature have been updated (long before you left your comments on this blog) stating that the message search function would be fixed for all groups that have reported the issue beginning the middle of May.
Posts that were updated: http://ygroupsblog.com/blog/2009/04/15/groups-update-missing-groups-aol-missing-members-message-search/
And: http://ygroupsblog.com/blog/2009/04/07/update-message-search/
As an FYI I do often update posts once we have new information (just as I did in this case)– since this post is on invite limit changes, this post did not include information on the changes to message search.
-Melissa
Judith Stein said,
May 10, 2009 @ 9:51 am
@MELISSA–so sorry, I was not aware one had to search back through old posts to see whether updates had been added. I figured updates would be at the top of the blog.
And I wouldn’t expect information on message search in a post about invite limit changes. I did think you could respond to my question in the most recent comments, though.
Well, now there *is* an update post, and you did respond to my question in the comments, so now I finally have a response. Thank you.
Malcolm Weallans said,
May 11, 2009 @ 7:06 am
I am new to the wonderful world of Yahoo groups, and so far I am less than impressed. I set up my new group and invited members – and nothing happened. So I sent them a private email telling them about yahoo groups and inviting them to join. They have all told me they have asked to join the group but I have seen nothing. I have been into the group as a moderator and added another account of mine manually, and that worked, but when I tried to add other accounts in this way it caused an error.
I am getting very frustrated. Presumably google has an alternative.
Leslie said,
May 13, 2009 @ 3:18 am
This is weird. About an hour ago I sent an e-mail to 4 groups – 1 original and 3 CC’s. So far only one of the CC’s came through – it’s made the archives of at least one group.
I’ve been noticing lost e-mails and digests lately on verizon – they aren’t in the spam folder either.
Leeann said,
May 16, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
I don’t like the new rules at all and thay need to put it back like it used to be!
TICIA OTT said,
May 18, 2009 @ 2:26 pm
I asked for an invite last week and still have no response. I live in Smithsburg and its much easier to freecycle from this group
Dina said,
May 19, 2009 @ 9:50 pm
i am having a problem “adding members” automatically (”from existing email list”). the invite feature works, but i want to add my members automatically without them doing anything (this is easiest for non-techy savvy ppl). however, it hasnt been working the last 2 days- i am getting an error message. how can i fix this? have i been banned from adding new members this way?
Camelia said,
May 20, 2009 @ 3:42 am
I have a different problem: can you allow us to edit the message when inviting someone? It is not very pleasant as it is right now. Or, at least, please add the description of the group to the invitation. Otherwise is useless…
Wendy Cutler said,
May 20, 2009 @ 2:07 pm
It’s still very difficult as the manager of several groups, to deal with a personal limit of 10 adds per day. Why is this not a GROUP limit, not a personal limit?
It’s not true for my groups that if people want to join, they will, so they can just be invited. It’s one thing if it’s a social group, but my groups are club notification email lists, and people who sign up for news don’t really want the yahoo id and are reluctant to take positive action to join the group. Yet they did sign their name on a list (a non-techie procedure) requesting to be put on the list. I know they’re not the crowd that yahoo likes to see as its users, but as I see it, I bring these reluctant people to yahoo, or try to, but yahoo makes it very difficult for me. I get one or two-month’s worth of sign-up sheets in the mail every now and then, and it’s yet another delay and organizing hassle for me to get these people on the list.
How about an approved list of moderators who are allowed more adds and invitations?
administrator said,
May 21, 2009 @ 12:05 am
Camelia, custom messages attracted spammers abusing the system thus the custom message feature within invites had to be suppressed. We’re working on how we can enhance this to give the ability to customize the message. Thanks.
Bijan said,
May 22, 2009 @ 8:45 am
A coupleof related Qs:
1- Is it possible to add more than 10/day to a group?
2- Is it possible to make the defualt (when you add a person to a group) to be the “Daily Digest” rathen than Individual?
Thanks,
Bijan
Sanjeev said,
May 25, 2009 @ 6:45 am
When yahoo will increase the limit for direct add in yahoo group. There
are many months have passed. I can add only 10/day instead of it before
it was 100/day in 2008.
Please, My group is more active group in yahoo directory and we send only entertainments,knowledgeable daily mails to our members. So, Please increase the limit of add members so that we could add our friends from the whole world.
Please, Pay attention on my request.
Thank you
with regards
group owner
usweetangelgroup
Lisa said,
June 1, 2009 @ 8:01 pm
I can’t find the “Invite Members” button either. What happened to it?
Donald Abbott said,
July 1, 2009 @ 7:14 am
I was not aware that I had a limit of 50 emails per week. I guess I have too many friends sending me emails that I like to share with other friends. If this is you weekly or hourly limit I guess I will have to locate another server. My wife and I both like yahoo very much but I can understand you have to make decisions that are good for you and not mecessaryly good for your customers.
Thanks for all your good service but if this decision remaines then we will make another decision. Reply if you want to keep us as a customer.
Daniel said,
July 6, 2009 @ 3:06 pm
I understand the limit for 10 direct add members only, but how long does it take to process each batch of 10? I’m patiently adding 10 each day for our technical support group, something for which I can’t rely on invites or people will just sit on it, and it seems that I can’t always add 10 every day. For instance, I added the last 10 yesterday, Sunday, about 1 pm EST. And today, Monday, 6 pm EST, it still tells me I reached the limit? If it helps, I’m the owner of 3 groups, moderator of 6 total.
Cass said,
September 20, 2009 @ 10:32 am
This limitation is extremely frustrating for those of us managing large groups. Being able to only add 10 and invite 50 members per day makes the process tedious and time consuming.
Stephen said,
September 30, 2009 @ 7:58 pm
You should not have broken a basic feature without putting a replacement process in place. Surely there is a way to verify that we are upstanding individuals and increase our limit. I can’t believe you lowered it to 10 members/day, which makes the group almost unusable for me. I am sorry that I chose to host my group at Yahoogroups.