Groups Update: Attachment Feature and Message Search
Over the past few weeks several of you have asked for an update on the new attachment feature and message search issue. Below, you’ll find a quick update on these two items.
Attachment Feature: On March 31st we announced that the new attachment feature would gradually be enabled on all groups. Since then, many of you have seen, tested, and commented on this new feature. We are still in the process of rolling out the new attachment store option to all groups (currently there are over 10 million groups on Yahoo!) and we appreciate your patience while we incorporate new groups into the mix.
Message Search: We know that for those of you plagued by message search issues this has been an incredibly difficult issue to deal with over the past few weeks/months. We appreciate your patience and are happy to inform you that we will begin moving over all of the groups who have reported issues with the message search feature in the next two weeks. If you have reported your group (either to Customer Care, or, using the survey link found here ), your group will be moved over during the middle of May. Remaining groups will be moved over once affected groups have been migrated over to the new solution.
Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager
MK said,
May 9, 2009 @ 6:17 am
good work yahoo groups team
joel baumwoll said,
May 9, 2009 @ 8:30 am
My group has been receiving a large number of spam posts today. What can be done to avoid this?
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shep/
Maurice said,
May 10, 2009 @ 1:22 am
Wow ! 10 million groups in Yahoo!, congratulations.
Some of the 33 groups I’m an owner, moderator or member of are still waiting for the new feature.
Maurice
Cynthia H. said,
May 10, 2009 @ 7:19 pm
Yes. Having no functioning Search makes finding recent discussions, information, references, etc. very difficult, so when there are newcomers to a group who ask the usual beginner questions (but in their own ways), experienced members can either ignore the questions OR restate everything each time.
And, of course, not having reliable information from Yahoo in the beginning (or any info at all…) re. Search dying didn’t help. I would LOVE to be able to rely on your statement that by mid-month (May 15 is this coming Friday), Search will be restored on the many groups I belong to and/or moderate, but…it’s difficult to do so.
Ben Slade said,
May 11, 2009 @ 9:05 am
Wow, it’s really pretty bad to be missing a basic function like search. At the very least there should be a big red banner message on the search page saying searches for some groups are not returning results for the past month.
(I have submitted info at the special survey page about search problems for the group I help moderate)
Saundra said,
May 11, 2009 @ 11:18 am
@ Melissa
Is there a way we determine if a group has already been submitted to be migrated in the middle of this month? It’s been awhile, and I can’t recall for sure which of my groups experiencing the problem I’ve already submitted . . .
Melissa Daniels said,
May 11, 2009 @ 5:12 pm
@Ben Slade,
With the exception of today (as there is a temporary message up) there IS a “banner message” on the search page saying that if you’re having issues with message search, please report the issue here– and then users are directed to the survey link where they’re able to fill out the necessary information regarding their groups.
This message lives on the top of the page (we call it a “Blast Message”– you can see an example of it in this blog post, where we talk about the blast message when we were discussing the outage. http://ygroupsblog.com/blog/2009/04/10/planned-outage-monday-april-13-2009/ ).
-Melissa
Melissa Daniels said,
May 11, 2009 @ 5:14 pm
@Saundra,
No– we don’t have a database you can search. If you’d rather be “safe than sorry” you’re welcome to submit your group(s) a second time.
-Melissa
نورا said,
May 13, 2009 @ 1:29 am
احبكم
2kS - Internet Strategy Consultant said,
May 13, 2009 @ 2:27 am
What a shame it is that these posts get comment spammed so much. It makes it genuinely difficult for those of us who are genuinely affected by the serach issue to follow the thread.
Anyway. Here’s hoping that the mid-may timetable for moving us is achieved. Will Yahoo let the list owners know when they have been migrated?
Paul Bowles said,
May 13, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
I’ve had a number of complaints about the new way of sending attachments. My group members hate it. How do I get back to the old way?
Richard Huss said,
May 14, 2009 @ 9:30 am
I’m not the first to say this, nor will I be the last. But I cannot comprehend why you cannot provide the option of sending out the attachments with the email message, as you used to do, *and* storing it in the groups archive, which would be a great enhancement (albeit one you should have had years ago).
To give everyone a choice of three options, which does not include the one option that very significant numbers of groups need, is just crazy.
jay vinton said,
May 14, 2009 @ 11:34 am
just to add my voice to the requests for the needed 4th attachments option: include attachments in both the archive and the emails.
Ed W said,
May 14, 2009 @ 4:34 pm
attachment rollout snafu continues:
I don’t want you to roll out the new attachment feature in my group.
Every group I belong to where it’s been rolled out has suddenly been switched to archiving without notice to or permission of the group owners.
NONE of the groups I’m in want to archive.
All have had trouble switching back to email attachments. Sometimes days worth of messages went out with the attachments stripped before moderators realized it was happening and found out what to do.
Some groups that were switched to archiving and managed to change back have been switched to archiving against their wishes again.
.
Ed W said,
May 14, 2009 @ 4:50 pm
Re 4th option
I and dozens of others asked why no 4th option many weeks ago. Never saw an answer. .
Several years ago yahoo did both send out emails with attachments AND archive the attachments with the emails. Yahoo stopped to archiving to save money (bandwidth).
I now think we’ll never see that 4th option because it costs more. That’s the reason for “either/or” but not “both”.
Pete Moulton said,
May 15, 2009 @ 5:48 pm
Sign me on with the folks who hate the new attachment ‘feature.’ Not only does it store photographs without seeking permission, but it makes the original attachments impossible to see at full size. I belong to the groups I belong to because I want to see the attachments just as the posters intended, not compressed to within an inch of their lives and so small that the detail is gone. There are some excellent photographers in these groups, but you’ll lose them all if their photographs are subjected to this kind of treatment.
I also post photographs that I want the group members to see. I don’t want them to judge my work on the limitations of this ‘feature.’
Some of my groups have reverted to the previous email attachment system, and I’ll stay with those. The few which insist on using this ‘feature’ I’ll quit, after posting to the group at large exactly why I’m quitting.
James said,
May 15, 2009 @ 8:35 pm
Why does Yahoo change the settings to view attachments on the web when I chose the attachments to be emailed to the group???????????
They have changed it twice now and I and my members are getting p***** off
Heather the Moose said,
May 16, 2009 @ 4:32 am
The new attachment feature is really confusing to the non-tech savvy people in my group – especially those who don’t have yahoo ID’s, i.e. they were directly signed up by the moderators.
Can this be changed. We’re a writers’ group & story files are the lifeblood of the group.
Paul Bowles said,
May 16, 2009 @ 6:43 am
Melissa,
You reply to posts about everything except the new way attachments are being handled. This is a mistake. Most of the Yahoo groups I own are doubled in Google Groups, where attachments both stay with the post and are archived. Now, tell me, why should those of us who own Yahoo groups where posts are attachment heavy stay with Yahoo because of your lack of response when we could simply migrate to Google (Or some other provider) and, thereby, cost Yahoo advertising revenue?
Win Bennett said,
May 16, 2009 @ 7:14 am
My small group hates the new method of treating attachments… I want to change it back… I have gone in to “posting and archives”, but I can not see an edit button to alter it… please advise me what I can do.
I was given the group to run when the owner was dying, I have been appontded as 1 of the owners but it seems that from reading, the group is unmoderated… I need to get the attachments back to normal.
Please send full instructions
Janice said,
May 16, 2009 @ 10:49 am
I thought the idea for archiving the attachments was a good one. The one problem/complaint I have is I don’t know why you switched the different options from just attaching it to an email and now there is a thumbnail and original size (and another option maybe?). My small group can figure it out, but for me, the old way was better. Thanks for bringing the attachment archive BACK.
tanzen777 said,
May 16, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
I believe things are getting worse than ever… please go back to the way attachments were handled several years ago: let them stay in the archives along with the posts.
Many posts do not get distributed these days… things are not as they once were.
regards,
frank
jay vinton said,
May 17, 2009 @ 10:27 am
Dear Gordon and Melissa,
1. It seems like the bugs have been getting the better of yahoo in the last couple of months. Any comments on that?
2. Also, now that yahoo understands the reasons for the problem with missing message text, what are the prospects for yahoo correcting this?
3. And finally, what are the prospects of yahoo adding the 4th option being asked for by many group owners for attachments to be included in both the emails and the archives?
Many thanks,
— In GroupManagersForum@yahoogroups.com, “Gordon Strause” wrote:
>
> Just an fyi, we have gotten enough reports so we understand what is happening (although we’re still not precisely sure why).
>
> That said, Shal’s right that that the work arounds include:
> – Replying in plain text
> – Switching to traditional from fully featured
> – Replying from the web (fairly sure all the problem posts occur when posting from email).
IceRyder said,
May 17, 2009 @ 1:11 pm
We just received the new roll-out on one of our lists. Thanks for the work on this feature.
I would love the “include attachments in both the archive and the emails” function.
Also, I wonder if there is a way to allow attachments but not allow HTML posting.
I try to limit postings to our lists to plain text to help stop the spread of viruses, and save archival space, etc. Also, plain text keeps the archives cleaner and easier to read.
Thanks!
IceRyder said,
May 17, 2009 @ 1:19 pm
For those who want to change the attachment settings:
[] Login to YahooGroups
[] Click onto the specific group
[] Click onto Management (in the left sidebar)
[] Click onto Messages (under Group Settings on the right side)
[] Click onto the Edit button next to Posting and Archives
[] Click onto the appropriate radio button under Attachments
[] Save Changes
Judy
Andraea said,
May 17, 2009 @ 5:21 pm
I regret to say that I don’t like the new facility. I belong to a group sharing gaphics and used to be able to just drop and drag the attachments across to save them to a folder. As I do with OE. Now I have to go to some place I don’t want to be and download each image individually. I don’t seem to be able to highlight them all and download as a group.
Darn, why in the pursuit of modernisation does Yahoo have to make a backward step and make life more difficult?
Zunaira said,
May 18, 2009 @ 1:14 am
My group has been receiving a large number of spam posts today. How i can stop it.
Rodney Sims said,
May 18, 2009 @ 12:46 pm
None of the documents in the FILE section of my GROUP can be accessed today, and I’ve checked other groups I belong to, and they have the same problem.
I like the Attachment addition feature, but I choose to let my members upload files to the FILE section, instead of using attachments.
lil_bee_ii said,
May 18, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
possible to keep replies to topics in thread, instead of them posting as individual replies?
Maurice said,
May 19, 2009 @ 5:12 am
The new feature has been enabled in my most active group and I’ve sent several posts there, with image files attached, as I did every week before. Several members complained about the new feature, they said it was a pain. They argued that before, they just had to make a click to download the files in their computer. Now they have to click several times, and, still, it doesn’t work well all the time (s : for example, they can’t view the images in the ‘Original’ view option – the images I send are 768X1024 pixels or so, in the .gif format).
So, I’ll probably switch back to the old settings, which most members are used to; and I join the moderators who’re requiring the full feature , attachments, not links, in the postings and Individual emails; although I know it requires huge disk resources in the Yahoo! servers.
All the best,
Maurice, in France
Janet said,
May 19, 2009 @ 3:34 pm
In one group I belong to, I can no longer see the “Messages” link on the side bar. I can see “Post” and “Attachments”. It also says the group has had no activity in the last 7 days, but I am receiving digests. I have contacted my group owner twice with no response. Is this a group issue? Or a yahoo issue? Can you help?
Thank you,
Janet
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Stephanie HC said,
May 19, 2009 @ 7:10 pm
Since this is the newest blog post and there has been NO advisory on this – what is this supposed to mean on the My Groups page:
>>Don’t share my updates
Prompt me: Before sending updates <<
What is this all about? I am going to be asked by group members and I dont have a clue myself! What are “my updates” and who am I supposed to “share” with? and why?
Richard LaFlame said,
May 19, 2009 @ 7:22 pm
What is this junk that they have put on our Groups Page? Is there any way at all to remove this new column on the right side? It is a pain and I just do not need it at all for any reason. I want to remove it now.
Kathie M. Thomas said,
May 19, 2009 @ 10:08 pm
May I say I HATE the new attachments set up? No-one can view the images posted to our group now, or very few of us can. The links don’t work and I get constant error messages. A comment above seems to indicate I can change back to the old way – I want to do that but can’t figure out how.
Maurice said,
May 20, 2009 @ 1:56 am
Well, last night, things happened in the Yahoo! Groups while I was sleeping !
Firstly, it seems that the feature ‘Storing Email Attachments’ has been cancelled – at least, it’s been removed from the groups I’m a member or moderator of. I think it’s not a bad thing, since lots of members had posted complaints about it. But I’d like the Yahoo! Groups’ staff to post a note to moderators before doing such things.
Also, a text appeared in right hand column of the MyGroups page, and this is a real pain. As far as I could see, this has nothing to do with the groups’ contents, rather with updates of the groups’ members Id. It ought to be removed from there !
Maurice, in France (moderator of several groups in yahoo.com and yahoo.fr)
Richard Kleinhenz said,
May 20, 2009 @ 7:43 am
Just after 2 of my groups got enabled for the new attachment and I told the membership, it’s broken! The attachments still get stored in the folder, the links in the email are working, but the links in the GUI are gone. ATTACHMENTS no longer shows up on the left below POST. Same situation in 3 groups I moderate. What gives??? Yahoo, say something!
Groups: penturners, penmakersguild, super11usersgroup
–
Regards,
Rich
Maurice said,
May 20, 2009 @ 8:38 am
Well, there’s a BIG DISORDER ! After the ‘Attachments’ section has disappeared from my main group, I’ve believed that Yahoo! had given up with the new feature. I sent my group an e-mail with an attached file so as to see if I received an attachment in my Inbox. Well, I received a LINK; then I came back to my site and the ‘Attachment’ had came back in right column… But it didn’t come back in other groups !
BUGS… BUGS… BUGS ! And Mrs. Daniels doesn’t say anything.
Tomorrow, I’ll switch all groups I’m a moderator of from ‘Store on site’ to ‘Store in emails’.
Maurice
colin said,
May 20, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
i keep getting error 999 messagers when i try and promote my group to lots of other groups. first i could post to about 300 groups using the “post” feature in the groups, then it driopped to about 250 groups before the error message kicked in, and now its down to 70 messages before the error message kicks in and locks my ability tyo post. why is this?
the error message states something aBout maybe having a virus or “unusual activity” coming from my computer.
are yahoo going to make it so we can post no more than one message in two hours ? the number of groupsd i can post at before being locked out is getting less and less. where will it end?
Maurice said,
May 21, 2009 @ 6:47 am
I’ve switched back to the old feature in a secondary group and, fortunately, it worked all right. I sent a message with an attachment and I received a message with an attachment in my Inbox (phew ! I wasn’t so sure, because of all the bugs in the Yahoo! Groups the past few days…).
As most of the members of my groups (those who’ve the option ‘Individual emails’) have a preference for the old feature, I’m going to switch back to it in my main groups.
Maurice
Helmut Sennewald said,
May 21, 2009 @ 3:55 pm
Hello Yahoo team,
The message search is still blind for every new messages from March until now. This is really bad for our large group(17000 members) and with 600 messages per month in average. We can’t search in more than 1000 of the latest messages. I filled-in at least a dozen times this form to get th search-problem fixed, but nothing happens so far from Yahoo. When will the message search be “repaired” for our group?
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/LTspice/
Best regards,
Helmut
Moderator
Julio A Juncal said,
May 22, 2009 @ 4:01 pm
I also will like to use the Attachment feature but not allowing HTML posting. Any solutions?
Donna said,
May 23, 2009 @ 8:15 am
All search function problems were to have been fixed by yesterday but as of today, still a problem. I have added our group to the priority-fix-list on two occasions.
So, what is the new expected date for repair. With a group like Freecycle, the search function is critical to our members and to the moderators.
Donna
Jim said,
May 23, 2009 @ 12:02 pm
The message search function is finding deleted messages and is displaying the first couple lines of them. The whole message can’t be seen, but to my way of thinking deleted messages should be 100% deleted.
Bart Fried said,
May 23, 2009 @ 10:02 pm
Recently, I noticed a limit on the number of archived messages included in a search. Our group has 18,000 plus posts and a recent search returned 145 hits but only going back for approx 3000 posts.
This leads to two questions … is the entire archive intact and why can’t it be searched in its entirety?
This is a serious issue for our group.
Bart
Ros Lamb said,
May 24, 2009 @ 1:49 pm
For those of us who use exclusively web-based email, how on earth can we forward attachments to non-group members without first having to download them to our own computers?
It isn’t possible as far as I can see.
To forward to somebody who isn’t a member of the group I got the attachment from, they can’t see it.
This isn’t a copyright issue. The groups of mine that are affected are joke groups – people join on the understanding that their jokes are able to be shared with people who aren’t group members.
Kim said,
May 25, 2009 @ 4:40 pm
Donna says all search functions have been fixed, but my group still has no search function. When I search for a post, it only finds messages that were sent BEFORE March 15. This has been the case for months. Please help — this is making life VERY difficult for all of us!
Bobbie said,
May 26, 2009 @ 4:04 pm
We have several Dog rescue and Dog related groups. We need our attachments to go out to the group members individually and not to have them stripped away. We can not work this way. Personally I havdle about 1200 emails a day and I just don’t have the time to do my rescue work if I have to go get the attachments if I can find them and then download them to my computer just to upload them to people and sites like Petfinder. We need to continue our attachments with our individual emails. Also, one or two of our groups just stopped getting the attachments and we don’t know how to change it. Is there someplace we can look to fix this problem? Thanks!
Jamie Dimmel said,
May 26, 2009 @ 7:05 pm
This new attachments ‘feature’ has got to be the stupidest thing ever dreamed up. All it has done has made it twice as long to read my email as before, since if I want to keep an attachment I have to click the link, open Firefox, resize the image to original, THEN download it. Am looking to leave all groups since now it’s nothing but a pain in the ass.
Thomas L Miller said,
May 27, 2009 @ 4:52 pm
I love the new way of dealing with attachments. Somehow, please find a way to handle embedded attachments the same way.
Rob N said,
May 28, 2009 @ 4:00 pm
I can understand why the attachments mechanism has changed (far less load on Yahoo servers and it might work with digest) but tonight it’s not working for our group
The attachments are all corrupt – or rather too small. I’ve just sent a 451KB attachment to a group and when it’s downloaded, it’s only 50KB…
Tried three times and have give up now.
Cheers, Rob.
Christy Lafferty said,
May 29, 2009 @ 5:09 pm
why would some members of our group be allowed to attach photos on the message composition page of the web-based version of yahoogroups, but others cannot?
ienpu said,
June 3, 2009 @ 9:39 am
I can’t post from my group site, or rather I do post but they never show up..this is the same for all the groups I belong to.
Wisco said,
June 22, 2009 @ 11:50 am
A lot of people are waiting for some sort of resolution to our problems with this seriously awful new attachment system. This is the latest post on the subject and it was posted at the beginning of May. It’s now nearly July. Are we talking weeks, months, years before we get some sort of solution?
Can we get an update here or is Yahoo’s attitude toward people who are having problems “who cares about you guys?”
Golfmom said,
June 26, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
For crying out loud it’s been THREE months! When is the search feature going to work? For our Yahoo group (which is about 4 years old) the search has no messages available after March of this year. It’s ridiculous how long it is taking to “update” one feature that is important to our site. I’m glad these people aren’t trying to fix the economy. Uh oh maybe they are and that’s the problem??? Come on guys get it going or bring back the old search feature that worked just fine!
raza said,
June 28, 2009 @ 3:12 am
I love the new way of dealing with attachments. Somehow, please find a way to handle embedded attachments the same way.
So I Like it very much Thankxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Iris Compton said,
June 30, 2009 @ 4:35 pm
We are having difficulty with the new Yahoo Groups. When I send out a message WITHOUT an attachement, the message still says there is 1 attachment.
Then I get a slew of messages from people asking me to resend the attachment – of which there was NONE!
How do we solve this, I cannot find anything in the FAQ or HELP files.
Thanks!
Chris said,
August 13, 2009 @ 7:48 pm
WANTED:
Attachments
* Store on site (exclude from emails)
* Include in emails (exclude from site)
* Include in emails (Store on site) <<==========
* Exclude from site and emails
Katy said,
October 21, 2009 @ 3:20 am
This new attachments feature has screwed everything up. I can’t attach anything now with the new or the old system. NEITHER WORKS. Who can help me with this? It is very important as I am applying for jobs right now. I am REALLY FED UP.
Joanne said,
October 23, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
STILL having problems using the search feature…. no posts show up after March 2009 in any search. This is REALLY getting frustrating…..
rrr said,
November 29, 2009 @ 2:03 pm
When will search be (re-)implemented? I am in several groups and I have responded to the blast message and survey on several occasions. Nothing – absolutely nothing – has come of my efforts. The message search returns nothing, regardless of how specific or how heneral the search argument is. For example, one of my groups on Software-defined radio will not return any results when you search for radio (a term that is in nearly every message!)
This is ridiculous.
Kate said,
December 30, 2009 @ 12:49 pm
Are you EVER going to re-implement the message search function?? The old message search might have been clunky – but it was better than this NOTHING that we have now. I am a member of 40+ groups and NOT ONE OF THEM returns posts later than mid-March for any search. This is getting really annoying…
David McDonald said,
January 20, 2010 @ 5:43 pm
Well, It’s still not working!!! it’s now Jan. 20, 2010 and they said (back on May 8, 2009):
“…We appreciate your patience and are happy to inform you that we will begin moving over all of the groups who have reported issues with the message search feature in the next two weeks.”
My groups still have at the top, Yahoo’s message, “Having problems with message search? Fill out this form to ensure your group is one of the first to be migrated to the new message search system.” and when you fill out the form/survey it directs you to this Blog. Then you have to search for the “New Search solution” to get here and you don’t know any more except you just wasted 30 minutes for nothing.
Looks like they could at least give an update in the last 7-8 months on their two (2) week migration.
Eugene Donaghy said,
January 21, 2010 @ 3:32 pm
How do I change attachment settings when I am a member only hate receiving messages including [x Attachment(s)]
Eugene
secretagentman said,
March 9, 2010 @ 10:43 am
Let’s just face it guys – it’s time to leave Yahoo. They’ve become so “competitive” (I think that’s still the buzzword for incompetent) that they can’t fix anything.
How’s Google groups doing?
Anyone? Or someone else – it doesn’t matter really who it is as long as it works.