Groups Updates: Changes to Email
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
Monica said,
November 4, 2009 @ 4:27 pm
HI,
I’m not sure if this is related.. but suddenly, today on some of my high-volume yahoo group lists (sca-west) I’m getting a lot of digests that only contain 2 messages. I think I’ve gotten at least 4 two-message digests today.
Just hoping that posting this here will get the right message to the right person/group.
Thanks.
Patricia said,
November 4, 2009 @ 5:01 pm
The group I moderate is also experiencing 2-message digests. Any idea what’s going on?
Daniel said,
November 4, 2009 @ 5:13 pm
Melissa is there a current problem with digests? My group has sent out 5 of them in the last 2 hours, each containing 1-3 posts rather than aggregating 20-25 posts before they send.
Dreadaxe said,
November 4, 2009 @ 5:34 pm
For french version
* Change “Répondre à expéditeur” by “Répondre à l’expéditeur”
* Change “Répondre à groupe” par “Répondre au groupe”
* When I do Reply to Group” to Windows Mails, the title don’t change by “Re : Title” (french form with space before re), the title stay the same : “Title”
“ When I do “Reply to Sender” I have no email to “To;” + the same problem for title.
Gordon said,
November 4, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
The digest bug cited in the first three comments appears to be affecting all groups. We’re looking into it now and will probably roll back the release if we can’t fix.
Meanwhile, thanks Dreadaxe for highlighting the issues with the French format.
Gordon said,
November 4, 2009 @ 5:53 pm
We’ve figured out the problem with the digests coming after 2 messages. Should be fixed shortly.
Gordon said,
November 4, 2009 @ 8:06 pm
Digest problem should now be resolved.
Dreadaxe said,
November 5, 2009 @ 3:10 am
* To Windows Mail. When I have a message
“Re: [Tata_fr] Blaba” I do “Reply to Group” I change the title by “Re : Blaba” that create a new topic.
* Possibility to have the quote of the last message when I use reply to group or reply to sender
Dreadaxe said,
November 5, 2009 @ 3:13 am
Last one
Change > “Passer Ô by “Passer en”
“Résumé du jour” by “Résumé du jour”
Dreadaxe said,
November 5, 2009 @ 3:44 am
http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stU01TQEZIR1xYRFxbU19QVl9d/bug_y_g
Alex said,
November 5, 2009 @ 11:54 am
The removal of the sidebar is much appreciated. However, the mailto links at the bottom are useless because they don’t put the quoted text into the message body. Please bring back the “Reply (via web post)” option. I receive group emails in a high traffic Yahoo group with Thunderbird and a Gmail account, but I post with my yahoo account, which my default browser is always logged into. “Reply (via web post)” was a very convenient feature for me.
Rik said,
November 5, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
Thank you!!!
Dreadaxe said,
November 5, 2009 @ 7:20 pm
> “Reply (via web post)” was a very convenient feature for me.
Agree. It’s the solution for be sure to add the message to the godd place and have a well quoted text.
jfaulkner44 said,
November 5, 2009 @ 8:51 pm
I can’t believe you have done away with the ‘Reply(via webpost) option. In order to get part of the last message to show, I now have to do a copy paste to either the reply option at the bottom of the message or do a reply from my email program. I don’t want all of those message being sent from my email.
Please put the ‘Reply (via webpost) back.
I would like to have a response to this issue.
Thanks
Judy F.
Robert Karl Stonjek said,
November 5, 2009 @ 10:15 pm
Regarding the change to Special Notices:
The change to the Special Notices has resulted in a flood of complaints by my members and several have left my main group (I own three, am moderator of another three with a total membership of over 6,000).
There were only 20 responses to the suggestion that the change should be made. I have more than 20 complaints thus far and all that Yahoo! can do is suggest that I start another group…
I send News messages and Scientific Papers via Special Notices so that members can choose between news only or news + discussion.
My members include famous scientists and authors such as Professor Napoleon Chagnon, Professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Professor Donald Zimmerman, Professor Frans de Waal, Professor Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Professor Daniel Dennett etc etc more than 1,000 professors in all and most have published papers and/or books eg Professor Ralph Holloway (recently featured in The New York times), Steve Moxon, Professor Philippe Rushton, Dr. Helen Fisher, Professor Kathryn Coe etc (Most of these names are featured in Wikipedia).
Am I to treat them like a bunch of naughty litytle school children and tell them to move to another group?
Yahoo! wrote to me and said
“It was in response to one of our most popular suggestions”
20 members responded…100 flagged the thread as interesting. That is a ‘popular’ decision???
Here are some of my members comments:
Dr. Daniel Pouzzner:
“Yahoo thinks I’m off digest mode, but I can’t get logged into it to switch it back. Can you try jostling my status? E.g., if it still says I’m digest, switch me to non-digest, then back to digest?”
Dr.s William and Adrianne Casebeer:
“Just FYSA, for some reason your messages are no longer coming in digest format once a day, but are arriving in a steady stream. I haven’t made any changes to my Yahoo account settings; did something change on your end?”
Dr.Aurelio Jose Figueredo:
“I have been getting the evolutionary psychology postings as a daily digest for some time now, but for the last couple of days, your postings (and nobody else’s) also appear individually in my inbox. Any idea what might be happening?”
Dr. Christopher Ryan:
“Hi Robert,
I’m not sure why, but since last night, I’ve begun receiving posts from you individually, rather than the compound post I’d been receiving up til now. I’m only getting posts from you this way, not from other members of the list. Please tell me if there’s something I need to do to return to the previous configuration. Thanks.”
etc
Kind Regards
Robert Karl Stonjek
Gordon said,
November 6, 2009 @ 12:57 am
Robert:
A few points:
- 100 votes does make it one of our top suggestions. We’ve had, I believe, more than a 1000 suggestions in the life of the Suggestions Board. Less than 20 have received more than 100 votes.
- But on top of that, we’ve also seen lots of feedback on this issue in other forums we use for tracking customer needs (e.g. user studies, town halls, user round tables, “groups about Groups”, customer support reports, etc.)
- In addition, we tend to give extra weight to the feedback from our most active groups. And for moderators of busy groups (which tend to have most users on digest), this issue was one of their most severe pain points, since the lumping of special announcement into digests essentially eliminated any way for these moderators to make important announcements more visible.
- Your use of “special announcements”, as a way to essentially create a sub-list for your group, was extremely creative. But it’s different than the way that other moderators use special announcements and not really what the feature was intended for.
- The right way for us to address the need your group has (and many other groups as well) is for us to offer either some kind of sub-groups type functionality (whether it is full sub-groups or just multiple message boards) or the ability for users to subscribe to some kinds of topics and not others.
- Unfortunately, while this IS functionality we plan to offer in the future, it requires major architectural changes to the way our message system works and isn’t going to happen in the short term.
- So the easiest short term solution is probably for you to create a second, announcement only group for your current special announcement users. This doesn’t imply treating these members as “naughty children”. It just means that the functionality of Yahoo! Groups has changed slightly, so that you need to adjust the way your group(s) work.
That said, I know it can be difficult to get folks to join a second group. And with our “add” limits forced (because of spammers) to be set at only 10 per day, adding a big group of users isn’t really an option either.
However, I have the ability to bulk add more members using our admin tools. And given your situation, if you contact us at moderatorcentral-owner@yahoogroups.com , I’d be happy to help you with this.
Thanks,
- Gordon
Robert Karl Stonjek said,
November 6, 2009 @ 8:08 am
Thanks for that Gordon.
The change to our group (using Special Notices) was in response to protests over the number of postings per day. One solution floated and rejected was creating a second group. The idea was rejected at that time (2006). I came up with the current solution which has worked well until now.
The previous owner/moderator changed the group to ‘closed’ when both his parents were ill and his mother was dying. He didn’t realise that the process was one way. It has been a problem ever since and so the membership has been slowly falling from the peak of over 3,500 to the current 2,900 (in the three years since the change).
But the horse has already bolted on this one ~ five members have left including well known scientist and author Dylan Evans (left today). You just can’t get that sort of quality individual back at a whim.
It already takes me from 3hrs on Monday to 8~11 hours on Thursday to administer the groups I already have (preparing Scientific News releases and paper abstracts takes time) and I don’t want to have to take on another group (Yahoo! is my main but not only provider/host with which I have groups).
As for big/busy, I’m not sure what you count as big or busy but my larger groups currently are:
Evolutionary Psychology, 2,900 members, around 2,000 messages/month (moderated)
Psychiatry Research, 1,550 members, around 300 messages per month (moderated)
and I am sole moderator for
Cognitive Neuroscience 1,000 members
Mind and Brain 850 members
[figures rounded off]
Indeed, it is 2AM where I am and in the course of writing this note I have moderated around ten messages, posted two news alerts and responded to a discussion on another of my forums.
The problems I am experiencing with the current change only effects my Evolutionary Psychology group. Many of the members are retired professors that are not especially internet savvy. But this is the group I am prepared to fight for. There are few new books in the psychology range (especially undergrad text books) that don’t list at least a few of my members in their bibliography ~ now that’s saying something
And BTW, ‘Little Children’ in the eyes of my members is pretty well anyone under 40…
Robert
Gordon said,
November 6, 2009 @ 9:47 am
Robert: Sounds like some great groups. Why don’t you contact me at the email address I mentioned above, and we can discuss the best options for your group.
Meanwhile, just an fyi, that it is now possible to change a “closed” group to a “restricted” or “open” group. We made that change a few months back.
Robert Karl Stonjek said,
November 6, 2009 @ 4:39 pm
Cool!
The cloud was hiding a nice silver lining.
Thanks Yahoo! Customer service for really caring
Robert
PS Sorry for being a little prickly ~ am overworked and was blamed by my members for the changes to the news service
Patricia Reeve-De Becker said,
November 6, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Hi,
The right hand sidebar is gone -Ok.
But then there’s just not enough info at the end of the mail. Actually I just checked again & it’s totally BLANK!
No automatic message ending, no way to reach the group hompage. Just like a regular eMail -Nothing to show a yahoo- group identity.
I got around the sidebar interrupting the text by just typing in a narrower column. And the majority of people know how to pick up a broken link with copy & paste if necessary.(I explained it to them, of course:-)
My groups are not as big as some mentioned here but the ’surprise’ is much the same. And the members don’t take kindly to change! It was hard enough getting them all logged in (explaining it all in German -before the German site was up)
Hope you get some positive changes done
Best Wishes
Patricia
Maryll said,
November 7, 2009 @ 10:17 am
Overall I’m positive about the changes. Thank you for the sidebar change – now I can return to using Fully Featured without having messages obscured. (You might also want to change the Message Preference Samples on the Edit Membership pages.)
The Special Notices delivery change is also good one. They were too easily overlooked/ignored in Digests.
The new reply options, however, are unsatisfactory and inadequate without any quoting. They essentially duplicate the email client options and do not replace the Reply (via web post) functionality that has been removed.
Removing the links to group web sections (Messages | Files | Photos | Links | Members) is only minor inconvenience for most of my groups’ members, but might be missed more by other groups.
Of greater concern are the messages that sometimes come trough without any group or Yahoo information at all.
Maryll
Ian Brown said,
November 7, 2009 @ 5:12 pm
To confirm what Dreadaxe posted a few days ago, the reply to sender link doesn’t always contain the senders email address.
There doesn’t appear to be any consistency as to which emails will have the senders email address and those that don’t!
Regards
Ian Brown
Sandra said,
November 9, 2009 @ 8:58 am
I really miss the Reply (via the web) option as I review all the incoming messages from my group on an individual e-mail basis and do not answer on an individual basis, but via the group messages. It was much more convenient to just click on the the Reply (via the web) option at the bottom to take me back to my group to be able to join in the discussion there. Please consider bringing back this option.
Our group has just over 3,000 members.
Thanks.
Sandra Rutan, Owner/Moderator, Tabtrailers group
Claire Jordan said,
November 10, 2009 @ 12:04 pm
Please, please, *please* bring back Reply (via web post) – the lack of it is making my group much harder to run and making it take three times as long to answer anything.
And as has already been pointed out, the new Reply options are useless to anyone involved in a discussion group because they lose the text you are replying to. You have to cut-and-paste it in and then insert the little “prior text” arrows and the note of who the previous poster was laboriously by hand. This has been a really, really bad development which has made Yahoo Groups much harder and less friendly to use.
Stacy Roberts said,
November 11, 2009 @ 3:40 pm
I’d like to see an option where I can turn off the individual Special notices emails, especially since they are already included in the digest. I am only a member of ~5 active groups, but the load of individual messages from this change is enough to make me leave groups I don’t utilize often. I went from simple digests which showed up sometimes as many as 10 times in a 24 hour period, to over 100 messages I have to delete. It’s so overwhelming that I don’t read any of them anymore, making this group set-up which was once useful now nearly useless.
Deirdre said,
November 12, 2009 @ 4:37 am
In the past few weeks, I have received a lot, not all, of messages with garbled text —as if they haven’t been processed properly. Can this be fixed?
abwoamar_2001 said,
November 14, 2009 @ 3:47 am
WE ARE GOING ON AND FAST TO GET THAT PEOPLE FLLY BUT WE MUST KNOW THAT NO ONE CAN STOP ALL WORLD FROM GOING ON .
YASIN OMRAN ALI ISMAIL.
morteza said,
November 14, 2009 @ 7:48 am
WE ARE GOING ON AND FAST TO GET THAT PEOPLE FLLY BUT WE MUST KNOW THAT NO ONE CAN STOP ALL WORLD FROM GOING ON .
YASIN OMRAN ALI ISMAIL.
morteza said,
November 14, 2009 @ 7:49 am
Overall I’m positive about the changes. Thank you for the sidebar change – now I can return to using Fully Featured without having messages obscured. (You might also want to change the Message Preference Samples on the Edit Membership pages.)
morteza said,
November 14, 2009 @ 7:56 am
I really miss the Reply (via the web) option as I review all the incoming messages from my group on an individual e-mail basis and do not answer on an individual basis, but via the group messages. It was much more convenient to just click on the the Reply (via the web) option at the bottom to take me back to my group to be able to join in the discussion there. Please consider bringing back this option.
ghassan said,
November 18, 2009 @ 1:25 am
i just cant see the pictures attached to the emails i got