Back in May we announced that Yahoo! Groups would begin publishing “Updates” about your activity within Groups. Upon launch, this new addition to Yahoo! Groups created an update when you uploaded an image to an open group but it did not notify your connections when you posted a message to your group.

Starting now, you’ll have the option of sharing your message updates with your connections on Yahoo!. For those of you concerned with privacy, it’s important to note that this is a completely optional feature. If you don’t want to share, you don’t have to.

For members, Message Updates are a way to offer more exposure to the content you have created and to effortlessly let your friends know what you have been up to.

For moderators, Message Updates can drive new members and increase the level of activity in your groups.

SUMMARY

• Updates allows an easy way to share your group updates with all your connections (ie. Updates are shown to your connection across Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo! IM, and your profile on Yahoo!)
• Updates is a feature that is fully opt-in per user per group (ie. you can opt-in in one group while remaining opted-out in another)
• Updates is defaulted off for all groups. No updates will be shared unless you explicitly opt-in.
• Updates is not supported for Closed groups, Adult (age restricted) groups, or users using an alias (alternate profile for their group). In other words, it’s not possible to opt-in for these groups.
• For groups that require membership to view content, only Updates to the content being posted will be sent and non-members will still be required to join the group before being able to view the content in detail
• You can delete Updates on a case-by-case basis from your http://profiles.yahoo.com profiles page
• When posting messages only the message subject line and the date and time of the posting is shown in the update– none of the message content is shared to protect your group’s privacy. In order for people to read the full message, you must click on the update and sign in as a group member, if the group is not a public group.

TO GET STARTED
To edit your opt-in/opt-out preferences on a group-by-group basis, visit your My Groups page (http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups ). Then, click on the “Edit My Groups” tab where you’ll be able to adjust your updates settings for each group you’re a member of.

You can opt to “Share my Updates” and “Prompt me before sending updates” or, “Never prompt me before sending updates.”

Once you’ve configured your settings for each of your groups, you can visit the http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/updates/ page and manage your updates further. (Please note that in order to get to this page you must first complete your profile—you may do this by first going to http://profiles.yahoo.com ).

To find the Yahoo! Groups option, scroll down to the bottom of this page, and then select “Show All Yahoo! Sources.” Clicking on this link will expand a larger list of Yahoo! properties, including several Yahoo! Groups properties.

Once you’ve located Yahoo! Groups, set your sharing preferences using the drop-down menu to the right (you can share your updates with “Anyone” “My Connections” or “No One”).

Then, click Save.

Changing your preferences will move Yahoo! Groups up from this bottom “Show All Yahoo! Sources” group, to the top “Share My Updates” group—making it easier for you to manage your Yahoo! Groups updates in a flash.

Once you’ve configured your privacy settings accordingly, return to your favorite group and test it out by posting a message.

Should you want to completely opt out of Yahoo! Groups Updates, ensure that all of your Group settings are set to “Never” share my updates (this setting is found on the “My Groups” page) and, that on your profiles page, you have set your Yahoo! Groups settings to be viewable by “No One.”

For more details on privacy, profiles, and more, please visit the Profiles News Blog (and this particular post that was initially written for Answers users, but covers major questions and concerns regarding profiles and privacy).

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Update 8/6/09 7:00 pm PDT; 2:00 am GMT (8/7): The RepDB problem has been fully resolved and the system is again functioning normally for all groups on all four database clusters. We appreciate the patience people showed as we worked through this issue.

(Note: If you are still seeing problems in your groups, they have another cause. Please contact Customer Care so that we can investigate.)

This blog post was originally titled “New members not showing up on the member list”, but the problem is actually broader than that and I wanted to take a moment to fully explain.

As background, for groups with 350 or more members, Yahoo! Groups uses a “replicated database system“, which is a key component of the backend systems that have allowed Yahoo! Groups to scale to the size it has (100+ million users across more than 12 million groups, with some groups having more than a million members)

Unfortunately, we have a bug at the moment that is causing our “RepDB system” to back up and process incredibly slowly (most affected groups have not had a RepDB update since late on the 7/17). The impact on affected groups includes the following:

• The member list will be out of date with new members not yet appearing on the list (though they will appear in the management logs, which are fully up to date), making it impossible for moderators to change the settings (or remove) these members.
• Members who are not showing up on the member list will also not receive messages via email (although they can still read messages on the web or post via email).
• Members who have recently unsubscribed (but who were set to receive individual emails or digests) will continue to receive messages from the group until the RepDB system is up to date.
• Changes to email settings will not take effect.
• Members who have been reactivated out of bouncing status will still not get email.
• Exports from the member list will not be up to date (although “downloads” will be).

Apologies for the hassles we know this is causing. Solving this problem is the team’s top priority.

- Gordon Strause
Yahoo! Groups

UPDATE (7/16: 4:55 pm PDT; 11:55 pm GMT): The outage is complete.  If you are still having problems accessing your group (or other issues), please contact Customer Care. All comments to the blog are read by the team, but only Customer Care can actually provide support.

UPDATE: The outage scheduled for Wednesday, July 15, will not take place. Instead, on Thursday, July 16th, there will be a site-wide outage impacting all Yahoo! Groups.

During this time, you will not be able to access any of your groups, and, mail will be delayed. Once the site is back up, mail delivery will resume. This outage will start at about 3pm PT (10pm UTC/GMT-to determine what time the outage will take place in your neighborhood, please visit this link: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html) and should last roughly 2 hours.

This week (July 14, 15, and 16), we’ll be performing maintenance on the remaining 75% of Yahoo! Groups that were not affected by last Wednesday’s outage.

This maintenance will take place over a three-day TWO DAY period (July 14, 15, and 16), as we’ll be working on 25% of Yahoo! Groups at a time. This means you may be able to access some of your groups, but not all, during the outages. For the affected groups, mail will be delayed, but will return to normal once the outage is complete.

All of the outages will take place at 3pm PT (10pm UTC/GMT-to determine what time the outage will take place in your neighborhood, please visit this link: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html) on the 14th, 15th, and 16th.

While we know that outages sometimes seem to come at exactly the wrong time, we again hope to have these next three done within 2 hours.

Once the maintenance has been completed, we’ll update this post.

Thanks for your patience!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Update (7/9 4:30 pm PDT;  11:30 pm GMT): Pending notifications and email commands should now be going working normally again (although unlike messages these notifications and commands are not queued, so ones that did not go out during that period will not do so; the implication is that pending messages and members during that time will have to be approved on the web and those trying to subscribe/unsubscribe/changes settings via email will have to resend their requests).

Update (7/9 10:15 am PDT; 7/9 5:15 pm GMT): We’re looking into reports of  email notification of pending members/messages/photos (as well as the confirmation messages for email commands like subscribe and unsubscribe) not being delivered.

Update (7/8 10:30 pm PDT; 7/9 5:30 am GMT): The logs problem has again been resolved and the backlog has been cleared.

In the last six weeks we have posted on the blog about a number of bugs. Here is a quick summary of the status of each of these issues:

BUGS STILL OPEN:

- Delays in Processing Activity Logs: This problem was resolved at the end of last week but returned (though on a much smaller scale) yesterday morning. The good news is that the queues are now headed in the right direction (in other words, the backlog is getting smaller), but we are currently still running about 10 hours behind.

- Message Search: Over the last two weeks, progress on the message search bug has been gated by the logs issue, both because the new message search system is dependent on “the queue” working correctly and because the same team is responsible for both systems. So as soon as the logs issue is fully resolved, this team will begin to migrate more groups on to the new message search system.

- Groups Being Recategorized as Adult: Despite a great deal of effort, we have not yet discovered the cause of the bug that is causing groups to be wrongly misclassified as adult, so we are still working on this problem. In the mean time, we have halted all advertising in adult groups until the issue is resolved.

- Text Disappearing in Some Messages Replies: This problem is being caused by the way some versions of Outlook (as well as Juno Mail) are formatting replies to messages (they are inserting the text of the reply in the wrong place, which is causing the script in Groups which deletes olds headers and footers to delete this text as well).. We have developed a potential fix that we are currently testing in QA, but users can also address the problem themselves by changing their subscription from “fully featured” to “traditional”.

NOTE: You can find information, including suggested work arounds, for other known issues here:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/issues/

RESOLVED BUGS

- Program Initialization/Temporarily Unavailable Errors: This problem has been resolved.

- Problems with Photos Uploads (50% Failure Rates): This problem has been resolved.

- Moderator Unable to Change Home Page Photos: This problem has been resolved.

- Yahoo! Mail UK Delivery Issues: This problem has been resolved.

- Messages Not Wrapping on the Preview Page: This problem has been resolved.

- New Attachments Feature Disabled (or settings changing): This problem has been resolved.

- Verizon & Comcast Delivery Issues: Not actually a Yahoo! Groups bug (the delivery issues were on their end), but based on the fact that we are no longer getting frequent reports of delivery problems to these ISPs, we believe the problem has been resolved.

UPDATE (7/8 3:50 pm PDT, 10:50 GMT): Maintenance is complete.  All groups should again be accessible. Thank you to the affected groups for your patience!

Today, Wednesday, July 8th we will be performing scheduled maintenance on the Yahoo! Groups databases. During this time, some of you may not be able to access your groups, and group mail will be delayed.

Maintenance should take roughly two hours, and will begin at 1pm PT (8pm UTC/GMT- to determine what time the outage will take place in your neighborhood, please visit this link: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html).

Once the maintenance has been completed, we will update this post.

Thanks for your patience!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE (7/02 3:30 pm PDT; 10:30 pm GMT):  The problem has now been resolved and all Mail UK users should now be receiving messages from Yahoo! Groups normally, including the backlog of messages that had not been delivered earlier (if you are still having delivery issues, please contact Mail Customer Care).  Our apologies for the inconvience.

We’re aware of the reports from Yahoo! Mail UK users that they are not receiving messages from their Yahoo! Groups and both the Groups and Mail engineering teams are investigating the problem.  Will update this blog post with more info as we have it.