UPDATE  (11/21: 5:45 pm PST, 11/22 1:45 am GMT):  Because of a bug affecting CAPTCHA on non-U.S. groups,  we’ve temporarily rolled back to the old CAPTCHA for all groups.

Starting today, you’ll notice a few more changes to Yahoo! Groups. This includes: changes to CAPTCHA, the ability to post from the owner address, and a fix for the problem preventing some users from being able to moderate groups via email. More details can be found below.

CAPTCHA

We know that transcribing and translating the CAPTCHA codes can be difficult. As of today, we’re updating to a new CAPTCHA implementation, which includes the ability to refresh codes you can’t decipher (versus being forced to try and fail), and the option of using an audio CAPTCHA for those who are visually impaired. Not sure what CAPTCHA is? Find out more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

Posting from the Owner Address

One of the most common requests we get from Moderators is the ability to post messages from the owner address (as opposed to the moderator’s personal address). This feature will now allow moderators to mail to group members using the GROUPNAME-owner@yahoogroups.com address, giving moderators and owners the option to post in a way that clearly delineates them as moderators. Group owners and moderators already have the option of rejecting messages from the owner address, a feature we pushed a few weeks ago.

Moderation by Email

Also in today’s release is a fix for group moderators who were having issues approving pending messages via email. Moderators affected by this issue were using email clients that (in violation of internet standards) do not honor case in reply to addresses, meaning that they would turn upper case letters into lowercase.  Since the codes that enable email moderation to work relied on the reply address being the exact sequence of characters we were expecting, email moderation commands did not work for these users.  But we have now updated our code in a way that will enable email moderation to work for even these email clients, which should allow moderators to approve pending messages and members via email once again.

As we continue to push out new fixes and releases, we’ll keep you posted!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved. If you are still seeing this issue, please contact Customer Care (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/general.htm)

We’re aware that some of you may be seeing an error message that reads “Your browser is not accepting our cookies”– we’re currently in the middle of releasing a fix for this problem and should have things back up to normal shortly.

Thanks for your patience.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE: For info on the “cookie” error message, please see this post

UPDATE: Site is back up. Thanks for your patience!

We’re aware that the groups site (and all of your groups) are currently unavailable. We’re currently working on the fix and will be sure to update you as soon as the issue has been resolved. In the interim you may see error messages like ” internal error – server connection terminated” or “connection refused” or may experience extremely slow load times. Thank you for your patience while we resolve these problems.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved.

We’ve been made aware of the fact that users who have their mail settings set to “digest” are currently receiving digests after just two or three messages. Typically digests are sent out at the close of the day, or, once the group hits 25 messages– whichever comes first.

The team is aware of the issue and is currently working on a fix. We’ll keep you posted, but in the meantime, please accept our apologies for the truncated digests.

Many of you regularly provide your suggestions on how to improve Yahoo! Groups here, on the Suggestion Board, and, on the “groups About Groups.” In each of these forums, we’ve noticed that one of the major pain points for you all is the ability (or inability) to easily read and respond to group emails. As a result of this feedback, we’ve made a few changes to group emails effective today.

Grey Sidebar Removed

If you receive individual emails in a group and have your Yahoo! Groups email preferences set to “fully featured” you will notice a change– the grey side bar that normally sits to the right in your email will no longer appear. Instead, the information it provided about recent activity in the group will appear at the bottom of the email.

We’ve removed the sidebar since it sometimes obstructed the content of messages, making it difficult to read group mails on mobile devices or in some web-based email programs. Additionally, the wrapping required to support the sidebar sometimes caused URL’s to break in messages or contributed to “funky” line wrapping. The removal of this box should help to resolve these issues and produce a cleaner look for your Yahoo! Group messages.

Old emails with sidebar:

New emails without sidebar:

“Reply to Group”, “Reply to Sender” Links in Individual Emails

Within each individual email you’ll now find links that allow you to “reply to group” and “reply to sender.” (Previously, these links were only present in the daily digest). These links will hopefully avoid the situation, where someone replies to a message thinking that it will go to just the sender but accidentally sends it to the entire group instead.

[Note: Hitting the “reply” button in your email client (versus using these links), will still work exactly as it did before. The replies will either go to the group or the sender, depending on the default setting for that group. You can tell which just by looking at address the message is going to after you click the reply button.]

Special Notices Delivered Individually

In the past, if a Special Notice was sent to one of your groups and you were set to receive your group messages in Digest format, your Special Notice ends up “lumped in” with the rest of the messages in the digest. As a consequence, members in highly active groups would sometimes miss these notices. Now, Special Notices will be sent out as individual messages, even to users who normally receive message as digests.

But two things to note:

• Digest users will also receive the Special Notices in their digest, meaning that they will receive TWO copies of the Special Notice—one as an individual message and one in their Digest. Unfortunately, given the way our system is currently architected, it is prohibitively difficult to remove these messages from the digest.
• Users who currently have their email settings set to “individual” messages or “special notices only” will not notice a change.

We hope these changes will improve your experience with email on groups. Thank you to all the folks who have provided suggestions and feedback on these issues.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager