Greetings Yahoo! Groups Community:
Since I joined Yahoo!, I have been extremely busy reading your wonderful ideas on the suggestion board and making sure the right people hear them. We were able to implement a few suggestions already. For example, John had some great ideas on how to update our help page to provide more information about editing membership, and we immediately made the changes here.
In fact, these suggestions kept me too busy to connect to a colleague with whom I had made several failed attempts to make a lunch date, until finally both our calendars opened up on July 21. He’s Belgian, and because Belgium is the world’s biggest producer of comics per capita, his email reply about lunch included some of his patriotic humor:
“Layla—Thank you for requesting to have lunch with me on the Belgian national holiday [July 21], rather than the French national holiday 
—Pieter” (July 14, Bastille Day, had indeed been one of our failed attempts for lunch.)
His email reminded me how I had met him in the first place: A friend had met him at Southbaybelgians, a Yahoo! Group dedicated to getting together with fellow Belgians to network. Although, if you want my opinion, they mostly meet to drink beer. After all, Belgium makes over 800 different beers, and each person in the country drinks an average of 150 liters of beer per year.
I figured Belgium’s National Day definitely deserved some coverage, and it would be fun to see what other Belgium-related Yahoo! Groups are out there. But first, what do we really know about the land of chocolate, French fries, mussels, and waffles?
Photo by historic.brussels
I could give you an overview with all the right figures — but isn’t that what Jimmy Donal Wales and Larry Sanger created Wikipedia for?
Instead, I’ll focus on one of my favorite topics: food.
Belgium produces 220,000 tons of chocolate per year—but looking at the average Belgian tells me they don’t eat it all. Brussels’s national airport is the world’s biggest chocolate-selling point. (That would be an airport I definitely would not mind a long layover at.) A Belgian by the name of Adolphe Quetlet came up with the Body Mass Index (BMI), which is commonly used to determine a person’s ideal weight. (Probably his way of dealing with all the chocolate and beer intake.)
Proportionally, Belgium has one of the lowest number of McDonald’s restaurants in the developed world. It has seven times fewer McDonald’s than the U.S. and two times fewer than France. Can we assume this is a health-conscious nation? Well, Brussels sprouts really do originate in Belgium and have grown there for over 400 years, but this doesn’t stop the Belgians from visiting their own fast food chain: Quick.
So how many Belgians do we have involved with Yahoo! Groups? Currently we have over 2,000 groups that show up in search results for Belgium-related groups.
welcome for twitter
nothing
for twitter
hy what can i do u do to gods to see ur love
Dear All,
We put a notice on our group home page which reads -
Important:
=========
* Due to yahoo problem many mails posted using ‘web reply’ are getting bounced! So please reply using your personal email boxes (such as yahoo mail), till this yahoo problem gets resolved.
What else to do!
Thanks,
Sreenadh
(Moderator of Ancient_Indian_Astrology Yahoo group)
I concur. Mail delivery, notifications, and posting/moderator approval times are serious problems, and have gotten much worse over the past month or so.
I’m still waiting, 15 hours later, for messages I posted and approved earlier today.
This service isn’t free — it’s advertiser supported, and Yahoo! owes its advertisers happy consumers — group members reading all those ads.
Why the main Yahoo! Groups Blog is being used to carry on about Belgian chocolates is beyond me, unless it’s being done to divert attention from more serious issues.
Agreed with the problems. I even tried to post a message directly from a group’s submission page (not through e-mail) and had it returned. Plenty of messages just aren’t showing up at all. Something is wrong. Please update group owners and let us know. Thanks!
Mail delivery is REALLY a problem.
I am less concerned about chocolate in Belgium than my groups working.
We just want the process to work and to feel that you all are correcting it.
Hello
there is a strong problem with e mail delivery
take several hours for a mail we approve to appear in the mail box of the members
same problem as we already faced in the past
i hope you will correct the problem soon
we just sort out of the problem of double mails we had to face more than 2 month befor you correct it, the members become nervous about the yahoo problems
thanks
Nubia
owner of Nubia_group
Messages are taking many hours to appear on our message board.I thought this issue was resolved…I guess wrong!!Please,fix the problem.
congratulation to Belgian National Day!, I like to read this post I will bookmark
and share this post for my friends. Thanks for sharing .
The condition of yahoo groups is pathetic now.
The recent problems we face are -
1) Most of the messages posted through “Web reply” feature (i.e. replying from the group itself) is NOT AT ALL GETTING POSTED in is failing (message posting failure notice will be received by members from yahoo after 2 days or so!). At the same time most of the messages posted from the personal mail box (such as Yahoo mail) seems to appear without a problem. What the heck happened with yahoo and when you are going to solve it?!! No wonder many groups won’t be getting much emails at all recently! Those mails can appear only when they get posted and when yahoo eats them up and is rejecting them, how can those mails appear in the group at all?
2) The search is feature is as if not at all having one such thing in the group! Earlier the search feature was much efficient and effective and returned useful results from the group archives (and we were using it a lot) and now it is simply useless and most of the time gives search errors and when works do not return useful results at all!
3) The email forwarding feature that was present in groups we loved, and some one in yahoo took the foolish decision of removing that excellent user friendly feature that made the interaction between groups possible (a particular discussion in one group forwarded to another similar group and thus triggering a discussion on the same there as well). And alas! this nice feature is no more available and yahoo seems to have killed it all together.
Please..Please… Yahoo is the BEST Group service available on net today. And it is excellent even as is. Please don’t kill it with such headless modifications which might kill it, or make it useless.
Regards,
Sreenadh
Moderator (Ancient Indian Astrology Yahoo Group)
A number of folk are reporting a delay between posting messages to groups and them appearing in the list. Some messages go through almost straight away; others 3, 6, 24+ hours later, so they arrive in a trickle and in a shuffled order.
no message delay in our group since last night…problem?? name of group: teaneckshuls
There is no doubt Switzerland makes good chocolate Francesco, and it’s very popular worldwide. Personally I find the Belgian chocolates are richer and have more variety. Pralines and dark chocolates are my favorites. Belgians also know how to package them… with refined boxes of your selection of assortments.
The land of chocolate is not Switzerland?
Screen shot for Edit Membership:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shalf/4654958597/
Hi Layla!
re the Help page — In describing how to find the Edit Membership link on a member’s entry in the Members list, I usually refer to “the Pencil icon”. That icon is visible in the Simple view, and has “Edit Membership” as its tool tip. That simplifies the instructions because it isn’t necessary to switch to Expanded View.