Hi, everyone:
Thank you for your immediate feedback.
It’s great to see how passionate you are about Yahoo! Groups. We realize change is never easy, and of course, all of us will face some challenges in this transition. While not everyone seems happy with the new design, we appreciate your candid feedback and want to send a special thank-you to members like Denver, Dreadaxe, Melissa Antoine, and Jac, who are taking a step back, recognizing the need for our changes, and offering their support. Your encouraging words mean a great deal to us.
Yahoo! Groups was one of the very first online social networks, and although our features were robust enough to provide support for our users’ needs when we started, the way we interact online has changed. We’ve worked hard to evolve Yahoo! Groups and incorporate modernized features that will help you communicate with and manage your online communities more effectively. Our top priority is to stabilize the site, and continue to intake your feedback as we make decisions for the upcoming releases.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the changes actually are, so let me take a moment to clarify a few things.
1. Once we’ve remodeled all of our groups, there will no longer be an option to switch back and forth between versions. We want to move forward with our modern look and enhanced features, and continue to introduce new improvements on an ongoing basis.
2. Email Changes? There won’t be any major changes in email communication, you will still be able to receive messages through your email, and nothing will change in that front.
3. It is true that you will no longer have a Rich Text editor in message formats when posting via the Web. This decision was reached after the continuing requests from our community to simplify creating and reading messages.
4. Some of you have been asking for a central email service routed to all group owner addresses, to notify them of upcoming changes. We actually have such a group in place, Moderator Central, which I welcome you to join:
4. We do not have any plans for making Yahoo! Groups a paid service.
Our Customer Care Team has created a helpful page with a complete list of changes in functionality that you might want to read through.
Now let me take a moment and address some each of your individual comments:
- Terry & James & Linda: Navigating content areas in a left-side control area has emerged as a common design practice. Additionally, with everything going on in your groups, making the main view a summary of all these activities was a natural way to ensure members can stay up to date. If you’re a visitor or not a logged in member, you’ll still be able to view the group description and group photo as before. If you’re a group member who is logged in, all you’ll have to do is click the icon to the right of your group’s name.
- Will Davis: Which features have been taken away from you? Could you clarify so I can address your concerns?
- Mike Clemens & Jan D: You’ll still have the option to see the whole message and its thread at one time. You’ll also have the option to sort your messages by date/time, as well as by subject. You’ll have both options, and this will make things less confusing.
We’ll continue to read your input diligently as we move forward with the remodeling. Once again, thank you for your loyalty over the past years. Please understand it’s not our intention to drive away your groups or members, but we do need to address the needs of our community as a whole, and to do so, we have to move forward with the times and update our systems and designs to reflect the evolving needs of our members.
We’re sure you’ll be pleased once you actually have a chance to see the new look and play around with it.
Layla & the Yahoo! Groups team
I think you stink I miss all messages as I dont know how to get them and it may be simple to you but I dont expect to go to college to be able to see recycle agaiin, I would get up and all day check my recycle it was on my yahoo address and now it isnt and it used to be so simple and now it isnt I read all your thing and it dont make sense to me and I know many othere that feel the dame way.You all went political and have these long wordas and explainnations of how you run this and I think it stinks I havent recieve one notice of recycle on my yahoo maill for days . Yes I miss it but getting so I couldnt care less vicki berry
—It is true that you will no longer have a Rich Text editor in message formats when posting via the Web. This decision was reached after the continuing requests from our community to simplify creating and reading messages.—
??? How does removing the possibility of using Rich Text simplify creating a message or reading it.
You’ve complicated it for me. What happens if I post by email and use Rich text in the email. Are you going to make it simpler for me by removing that choice too?
The Yahoo! Users have shared their concerns that have continued to be ignored and placated by Yahoo! Staff. Concerned groups users still do not know if ‘Reply to Sender,’ the Database, Links and Files sections will be honored with the new version. It appears as if Yahoo will roll out the remodel despite all our concerns and complaints, despite all the feature losses.
Please, lets try to make our voices heard. Here is a list of contacts for Yahoo! Inc and Corporate. Share your concerns with Corperate and maybe someone will listen to us!
The Corporate Headquarters:
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Phone: 408-349-3300
(866)-562-7219
(408)-349-1572
(408)-349-3382
Fax: 408-349-3301
Yahoo! Customer Service Phone Numbers:
1-866-562-7219 or 1-866-562-7228
The email address for Yahoo! Customer Care is:
cc-advoc@yahoo-inc.com
PLEASE let Yahoo know you do not support the remodel. Please repost these links anywhere you feel it would be helpful.
As much as I like change, I do not like this one. Some of the members of my groups, having neurological impairments, will not be able to figure out how to operate the new groups, and they are not posting to Facebook for the reason that Facebook is too messy and complicated for them.
You might take into consideration that as Facebook continues to swell, there are many members on Facebook who leave their accounts dormant or simply “end” themselves because for one reason or another they don’t like Facebook, or the Facebook craze has worn off for them.
It may be that Yahoo is jumping onto the wagon to be like Facebook just a couple years before Facebook usage declines as people grow tired of it.
You might also consider that Facebook may not take kindly to Yahoo making a near clone of Facebook and then calling it Yahoo Groups.
I am unclear about what to do here or where I should migrate my groups to.
From an aesthetic standpoint, there is nothing appealing to these groups now. They no longer feel “homey” but instead feel cold and impresonal.
Granted, this is a “free” service and so we have to make-do with what we are given, but I think Yahoo would do better attracting people to their groups if they developed something that was more unique than anything which exists elsewhere while keeping intact all the features we have with the current groups -um- and working the quirks out of those features so that they actually work.
“Search” sometimes doesn’t pull up things one day and will the next even though the same search parameters are used each time. Sometimes it won’t find the post I am looking for but I can find it manually after rooting through the archive, and, sure enough, the keywords are there, so no reason why search wouldn’t be able to find them.
I was relieved to see that the groups seemed to have reverted to the “old” version and that the “new” version is not online. I hope it stays this way.
Also, and not to be long-winded or too much of a snit, but I pretty much agree with every complaint that was made so far on this blog.
In the past, Yahoo has made some upgrades which I did not particularly care for, but those were mostly cosmetic changes. This is total destruction.