Hi everyone; it has been some time since we’ve announced what we have planned for the Yahoo! Groups community, so I thought I’d outline our plans for the coming year.
Over the past few months, the Groups Team has been hard at work strengthening and improving our existing systems, while simultaneously innovating and developing new features and options.
What’s new now…
So far, we have released the following to the site:
An entirely new search and browse system. This new system fixes a number of known issues, makes search updates much faster, and improves the sort order when you browse for groups (many enhancements related to this release were highlighted in the recent post called Yahoo! Groups: How long does it really take ).
- A new “Groups Lab” initiative which consists of a team of folks who work to create features within Groups that can be customized by moderators to fit the specific needs of their group. The People Map is an example of a feature that was developed by this team.
- A new technology platform for the site (not quite fully released). We are changing every page of the site but doing so in a way that won’t disrupt your existing experience. This new platform will allow us to release features and fix bugs much faster than ever before.
What’s to come…
But the exciting news is what is to come in the future. Here is a short list of the features we plan to unveil to you in the coming year:
- New ways for people to share information with each other within your groups: Product Reviews, Services Directory, Wanted Boards, Address Book, Event Planner, and many more.
- Message Boards 2.0: Improving the Message experience within groups in many different ways (e.g. giving members the opportunity to choose which discussions they want to subscribe to, making it easier for moderators to highlight the best content, etc.).
- Ability to charge an optional subscription fee for membership to your groups (we have no plans to get in the middle of the transaction, just make it easy for you to make sure members are paying).
- Photo Album 2.0: An entirely new photo system with massive group storage and stunningly large photos.
- The return of archived attachments: We will process attachments and store them on your group, if you choose this option.
- For our non-English speakers, the ability to select the language you want to view the site in and better handling of all types of character sets.
We’ll also work to address some of the top suggestions from the Groups Suggestion Board , such as allowing members to adopt abandoned groups, increase the number of characters in group descriptions, enabling moderators to send and reject messages from the owner address, and many more. (Look for a blog post in the near future with more details).
The entire team is excited to finally deliver on several of the features we’ve heard many of you ask for. Thanks for being such loyal members of the Yahoo! Groups community!
Best,
Leonard
Director, Yahoo! Groups
Just wondering…if I copy and try to paste when composing a message in the rich text format, I must first turn off rich text and paste and then turn it back on to use it’s features.
Gracelaw, when you click on Messages on the sidebar, do you have the option to (List as Individual Messages) at the top of the messages list? I’m able to go back and forth in all the groups I tested between Individual Message view and (Group by Topic). In the Individual Message view, there’s still the next and previous. In the topic view, the link is to the next topic.
What’s happened to “next!?”
I suspect that many group members read messages on their groups’ sites, as I do, rather than via email or digests … and I suspect many read as I always have: I open the first new message since my last visit, then click “next” to open each following new posting, viewing them chronologically. Suddenly, that function is no longer an option.
The new options are “next message” in the current topic, or “next topic.” Neither of those is what I want next! What happened to plain old next message, meaning the next one that was posted by my fellow group members!?
Hey! We just got word that Yahoo has finally gotten it together and is matching Google group’s attachment size of 20 MB. Has anyone else heard anything about this? We’ve tested this and have been able to send through an email with up to a 4 MB attachment.
I have used Yahoo! Groups since the early days after the E-Groups merger, and have owned or moderated dozens of different groups over the years.
My own feedback (and yes, I know some of it may be duplicative of the thoughtful comments shared earlier by others) includes the following “wishes”:
1. A mechanism for allowing moderators to gain owner rights over groups with no (or absentee) owners.
2. An ability to store/sort/archive closed polls — perhaps in a folder system.
3. A more precise system for auto-closing of polls at a specific date **and time.**
4. Optional date-and-time stamping of poll responses.
5. Optional permissions (on a per-user-group and per-user level) governing the ability to modify or delete their own posts, or the posts of others.
6. Optional right to grant/deny a moderator the right to review moderator logs, or to override default moderator rights on a per-user basis (e.g., to deny one specific moderator the right to set a poll, in a group configured to allow moderators the right to set polls but not members).
7. Ability to sort files and polls by any column.
8. Ability to archive to offline file the content and structure of messages/files/photos/links/polls.
9. Ability to specify a post number in a poll, to allow a member to click to see a specific post that might provide context to a poll question.
10. Ability to move/copy materials between groups (perhaps an owner-only right), to facilitate archiving.
Thanks much for you consideration!
I started using People Map in my Alumni group. It is awesome. Now we know who is near us and we know there addresses/ company/ phones etc. very nice feature.
Shiraz
Clarification please!
>>Message Boards 2.0: Improving the Message experience within groups in many different ways (e.g. giving members the opportunity to choose which discussions they want to subscribe to, making it easier for moderators to highlight the best content, etc.). <<
Does this mean going to a Message Board format and not an e-mail format? How will this affect those who download mail eg into OE? We already have some (dog) breed specific message boards and they are NOT as well supported as the mailing list format – it just does not work as well for an international group of show dog fanciers with a common and specific interest. Topics can morph into other topics but all are connected to the overall rationale for being a member in the first place. Message boards tend to separate topics and render them separate and unconnected. Also I am a moderator which means keeping things running smoothly – not a Dictator that decides what is or is not good, better, best or what is or is not important. I do not decide what is “best” – the group/list members do. Yes, there ARE groups that are run as Dictatorships – but ours is not one of them, and our members seem to like it that way
!
Regarding softbrat’s July 26, 2008 Calendar comment about events occurring on more than one day, I would like to be able to copy an event from one date to another. So often, my events don’t recur on a regular basis, but the same event with much of the same detail occurs again, and it would be helpful and feel less frustrating to just copy one of the instances to another date. I don’t think that’s possible now, is it?
I was a moderator of a group for several years. Last year I didn’t log in for several months and discovered my account could no longer access the group via web log-in. I still get new member approval emails, and the emails work. Also I get the normal discussion mail. Several Yahoo tech support people said my account was suspended, but now, when I log in, no evidence of suspension is evident (there’s supposed to be a link that says something like reinstate without saving old settings, but it’s nowhere on the welcome page). I’ve gone back and forth with tech suppt since December and have gotten no where. I cannot log in to access the group via the web, much less do moderator duties. When I try it acts like I’m a new member, and when I try to join the web page bombs. Anybody help!!!!!
LoloyD wrote;
> we really have to maintain some sense of courtesy with respect to the number of posts we receive per day.
No new feature is needed to accomplish that goal. That’s what a moderated group can do already!
Any limit on number of messages from one person would need to be an owner choice, not a one-size-fits-all limit.
Can the administrators please quote a bit from the entry they are responding to? I’ve had to scroll up to find the original entry and then down again to re-read the reply. It’s nuts to have replies so distant from the original complaint or suggestion, with no clue what the reply is replying TO
except for the name of the contributor!
The #1 item on my wish list is to have the window for editing messages the same size as the message window, so that moderators do not have to enter hard returns to prevent endless lines. I almost always have to edit the same message several times just to fix line length, because the edit window is narrower than the message window.
Just to add to that list, I also cannot access my Message archives, Database section, or Links.
In all – I am getting errors from Files, Messages, Database, & Links.
As it is now – I can barely use my group.
I agree with the masses here. I need the basics fixed before I can get excited about the new stuff. New things generally mean lots of bugs and kinds to be worked out, and if you’ve got a bunch of bugs and kinks to begin with, adding more bugs and kinks just piles on the frustration.
I’ve emailed so many times about my files section being screwed up and nothing has been done about it. I cannot create ANY files at all!! I’d like to be able to do this. I have basically three options here: Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, or MSN/Live Groups. I hate MSN because it forces me to use IE browser and I hate IE browser because it’s full of vulnerabilty issues. Google Groups is just all wrong for me. I do not feel at all comfortable navigating through there. It’s just too impersonal for me. Since I’ve been using Yahoo Groups since it was EGroups, well … this is my home in my opinion. But my home has been deterriorating it seems.
It’s like living in a 60 yr old house full of foundation issues and cracks in the wall, and all that’s done is a new coat of paint is slapped on it. While it looks pretty for a little while, things are still not working right. This is Yahoo Groups right now.
Here’s an example of just one of my issues right now:
Files
Files Help
We’re Sorry…
There was a problem with your request.
The page you’ve requested returned this error:
SF error: sfGetStats() returned error Cannot access list directory
If you continue to receive this error for more than 48 hours, please contact our Customer Care team. We apologize for this inconvenience.
This is my FILES access section of my group. Since I created the group I’ve had this notice up, and emailing about it does nothing for me. Please fix this, and all the other problems, and I will be not only jumping for joy, but welcoming the new add ons. BUt like so many others have said – we need to look at what’s broken for the time being. Don’t put your cart before the horse Yahoo Admin Team. You’ve got GREAT ideas, but you’re rushing the plans here.
I have a few comments and suggestions…
I LOVE the fact that posts are listed by when they are posted. I LOVE the fact that you can see them all at once and just click the topics you want to read. I love that you can read teh first few lines of each topic. I love that you can choose to get every email, or a daily digest in your inbox, or none at all, or only special messages, or view online. PLEASE do not change these features, or at least keep them as options.
*I think a chat room option would be cool, and used frequently by my group.
*I think music would be a cool option.
*I would like (in the future) to have a group spawn from my main group that would need payment fees. I agree it should be several choices, such as donation, regular monthly or yearly fees, or even a one time sign up fee.
I have an idea that would serve our group well…
I do a spotlight (which uses the photo on the main group page, and the description of that photo). I’d like to be able to set up 10 or 20 different ones and set them up to rotate each month, week, or even day. I currently have to have all of this information stored on my pc, and go in and manually change it each week or month when I get time. This way our members who request it can be spotlighted, and I only have to set it up once instead of for each one on a constant basis.
I also would like an option (for the owners or moderators, or whoever is given the permission) to have a box in the messages, so the message can be saved into a specific folder or archive. This way I can click any message that has event information, and place it into the folder or archive named “events 2008″. This will make it easy for my members to find, and will keep all the replies to that message out of the folder. Only the important messages will be moved. I’d like to be able to name the folders myself.
I would really like for the polls to be improved. the order of the options are all wrong, and I have to re create it several times before it is correct, which annoys those who get everything by email. I would also like the option to only be able to vote on a certain number of choices. Like your top 2 choices, or top 3 choices. (or maximum 2 choices, or maximum 3 choices) Not just 1 choice, or as many as you want.
The calendars need to be improved immensely! So many fields of information are irrelevant to what we are recording!! I need the option of choosing my own fields, or creating my own drop down menu choices for those fields. For example we need to include the admission price for one of our fields, we need to include whether it’s an indoor or outdoor venue, etc. Things that are just not available at the moment. There are also too many irrelevant fields right now, which discourages my members from filling out the calendar because it’s a long drawn out process. When you click on the date you want to enter, it should automatically show up in the date field, you shouldn’t have to re enter it. When the same event is on three or four different days, but not consecutive days, you don’t have the option to enter it all at once. I’d like to be able to enter several dates, that aren’t consecutive.
Thank you so much for listening!! I really like this group because it gives us what we need. We can’t find that anywhere else, and I hope you don’t get rid of too many features, because we don’t want to have to find a different group!
I would love to see the option of having music on your front page of the group like you use to be able too before that option was taken away. So many groups liked that and members too.
I’m happy for all the change and especially the one about the abandoned
groups but i do have one request.
I was allowed moderatorship over a group that the owner bounces in
most all year. I know as of right now shes been bouncing since Jan 15th
so that right there tells you she has no interest in the group. She
won’t reply to emails at all so can’t there be something yahoo can do
about this? If yahoo can look at a group and see the Owners record
then i’m sure it can be fixed.
I would also like to see an easier way of reactivating your email
once you have exceded the max amount of emails sent. I think that
should be upped to more than 15. Some people share alot and
when they get locked down for over sending, it tends to cause them
not to send at all
I like the idea about the bigger size email allowance and the photo
storage being bigger, great idea.
Thanks you
I am so glad the attachments will be back!!! Hooray!!!! Thank you!!
I am on about 7 lists, and have not received mail on any of them for 7 hours. What’s happened to all the mail?
Thanks a lot Leonard
i am happy if you find my ideas interesting
and more happy if you and your team can resolve this problem of html codes
best regards
nubia
Owner nubia_group
#
Administrator said,
July 21, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
@Nubia, the mail HTML issue is a problem, but we are working with that team and hope to have the problem resolved soon. With regards to your other ideas, there are definitely some ways we can make our process much faster for you as a moderator. Thanks for writing in. Best, Leonard
I totally agree with Carol about her suggestions..
I have suggested many times also that Our Yahoo Groups need to have
3 different Privileges like
1. Owner: Full Privileges
2. Co-Owner: Partial Privileges
3. Moderator: Less Privileges than the Co-Owner
The reason we need the Option button for co-owner is so the Co-Owner is not given the Privilege to ever delete Our group’s if they happen to get mad about some!
Also We would like to beable to apply music to Our Home Pages like we could before again!
This is My Suggestion
Thanks for taking time to read my comment/suggestions
Rosemarie YahooID sweetrosie1208
Liz’s idea to be able to post pictures instream seems so reasonable, if the group is set up to allow attachments. Even the traditional mail delivery comes in as html (is that because I’ve allowed attachments? – I can never figure this out), so it’s not more bandwidth to have the attachment at the end of a note than displaying in the note. Or is there a security issue?
RS and Leonard, thanks for the help on the email display. Yes, it does fix it to change email display from Fully Featured to Traditional (sorry for the delay – I had to wait to see a posting).
I remember people complaining in groups (years ago, either when it was an issue or I was paying attention) about people replying to postings who leave the whole original posting in their reply. They’re not going to have any choice if that’s not fixed in the Fully Featured version, which I assume, based on the naming, is the version that you want people to use.
Is there a way to link to a posting when we reply? I see that I had the comment number for a posting I did previously, but I don’t know how I got that or how to get someone else’s posting comment number.
How does the ‘Notify me of followup comments’ work? An email for every comment? I haven’t been ticking that because I don’t want a lot of emails. I’d just like to know if someone replied to me, or maybe get a digest, else visiting every now and then is fine while I’m still remembering to do that.
We need more lines in database 10 is not enough
> What do you use the bounce history for after a user has
> been reactivated?
To explain the member what happened and what exactly to complain to the ISP or the mail provider about; to see dates between which the member didn’t receive messages; to see the fact of not receiving at all; to make conclusions about reliability (and compatibility with Groups) of different mail providers in order to know to which to recommend members to switch if they are frustrated with current one. And at last, it’s called “history”. Wiping out (or hiding) history is not a good way to take lessons. How would you feel about wiping out history of, say, your country?
What I’d like is to be able to post pictures in my newsletter. I get newsletters from other authors who have their covers and events photographs. I was hoping that was what you meant by fully featured.
@Wendy,
Yes this is an error on our part. We had to make the change quickly and were not able to make it function exactly the way it should. We hope to have this fixed in the future, sorry for the confusion.
Best,
Leonard
@Loloy D, sounds like a problem that needs to be addressed. Thanks for sharing that with us. Best, Leonard
@Nubia, the mail HTML issue is a problem, but we are working with that team and hope to have the problem resolved soon. With regards to your other ideas, there are definitely some ways we can make our process much faster for you as a moderator. Thanks for writing in. Best, Leonard
@Lena, Thanks for you comments. What do you use the bounce history for after a user has been reactivated? Thanks, Leonard
One of the things you’ve changed recently is allowing us to add (not just invite) 100 members in one 24 hour period – the add page and the help text both say
“You may add 100 addresses per day. The limit applies both to an
individual group and an individual moderator”. But if we try to add more than 10, there’s an error message saying that the ones over 10 have to be removed. Your help people have explained to me now that I can go back in and add another 10, up to 100. Well, it would be really helpful to TELL ME that somewhere. I had no idea it worked that way.
Either allow the whole hundred to be added at once, or just add some explanation that it’s only ten at a time. Really, though, it’s a “gotcha” to allow people to enter many more than 10 and then make it an error. If only 10 at a time will be allowed, then fix the length of the entry panel. AND explain that we can come back for another round.
I love being able to do more than 10 at once. I add names from a sign-up sheet, and it’s been a real bother to get them all entered 10 every 24 hours.
@RS, thanks for all the helpful guidance. With regards to seeing all of your groups, we are reworking how we can pull all of your groups, which will make it much easier to pull the entire list the way you want to see it. Best, Leonard
I manage several “organizational” groups here in Yahoo Groups and a common problem I face and share with other users is the extreme heterogeneity of member’s preferences with regards to receiving email messages from our groups. For example, new members are more likely keen on saying “hi’s” and “hello’s” and posting senseless or pointless one-liner comments – now we don’t want to really discourage them or ostracize them but we really have to maintain some sense of courtesy with respect to the number of posts we receive per day. I would like to therefore suggest that you install a posting quota per member: examples – 10 messages per day, to 10 messages per month to 30 messages per month and so on. This will let us maintain our sanity in managing our groups and also put those one-liner posters in check.
I’d be very glad to see this feature implemented – Posting Quotas. Thanks.
happy to be one of this group
Hi
there are some feature which would be very usefull for us, specially for large groups with a lot of traffic mails
1. create a status of VIP
the owner of each groups could add this special status of VIP to his best posting members and these mails will go in a special folder called “VIP mails” (like actually SPAM)
we will not miss any mails of these VIP and will not be lost in the mass
2. the possibility to delete the mails in pending by CLICING a square and not like actually choose between 3 choises
and possiblity to delete all the mails in pending of a page in only 1 clic
there is an other issue very important for me YOU NEVER TALKED ABOUT
the problem with html codes happening since some month actually in all yahoo mails, which is of course also a problem in groups
the mails sent throught yahoo are corrupted in the html and some codes appear in the html codes who corrups pictures links
i wote to yahoo customer about this problem 1 month ago and gave them some exemples, they told me they are aware of the problem and work on it but 1 month after still nothing done for this and same problems
i hope this can be solved quickly now because it become really annyoing
thanks
nubia
owner Nubia_gorup
Hi…friends..
What’s up? It’s very nice to to say that our ‘Yahoo Groups’ cross another one milestone by giving us a cool feature. Thanks to Yahoo Goups. No more today. Have a day. See you.
very nice
Jimmie Spears: Thanks for all the positive information, have a blessed day!
I bet that after “rebuilding the system” we’ll have new bugs while old ones still will remain not fixed:
- extraneous strings in digests if Subject contains 8bit characters and is either long (thus truncated) or unencoded;
- overwriting X-Originating-IP header line if it was present in incoming message;
- moderators’ ability to ban some of owners;
- switching member to FullyFeatured on going to Bouncing and at reactivation;
- wiping out Bounce History at recativation;
- inability to turn off the spam filter on mail to -owner@.
I’m particularly disturbed by the “better handling of all types of character sets”. The road to hell is pawed with best intentions. Don’t mess with charsets! Many users’ mail programs and webmails cannot handle Unicode; quite often charsets are recognized incorrectly rendering message completely unreadable, as often happens with googleGroups. Please, never convert from one charset to another, never convert to Unicode!
@Denver, yes, we are looking into giving you significant control on the look and feel of your group. Thanks for being a beta tester! Best, Leonard
@John, none of the changes we have made should have caused that to happen. Have you had a chance to write in to customer care to see if they can track down what is going on? Best, Leonard
@Harry Quinn, you never need to apologize, a problem is a problem and needs to be fixed. I prefer a passionate customer to one who would not care if the product stopped working! Best, Leonard
@Desi, both of your suggestions make a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing those ideas. Best, Leonard
Totally different topic —
Is there a way to copy Files and some archived messages, without having
to select/ctrl C each message?
Thanks, Gesine
Can you expand a little on what it means to make information easier to share?
I don’t quite grasp the improvement, based upon the description.
What would be helpful for our group is to add a wiki companion to organize information. The file/links/database features are too structured — I’ll start a document and realize that the topic has two files, 3 links, and 5 database entries, etc.and then have to figure out how to cram all of them into one of the apps. A wiki page would offer more flexibility in integrating the content.
.
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Hi Leonard,
Thank you and to your team for everything that you do. I look forward to upcoming new features and the great enhancements! Just one question — is there a possible “re-design” (new look) of Yahoo! Groups in the near future? I was a beta tester of the beta groups a while back and I liked how we could re-arrange your group page the way you wanted with fonts and many color themes, including background pictures.
Thanks,
Denver
Is it possible that these changes are why one of my groups has ceased forwarding and archiving email? (KMM129852497V66158L0KM)
John
Leonard, I don’t know what happened last night, but now it’s back just like it was. Sorry for the emotional reply, but it was really not usabale the way it was lastnight. Harry Quinn
As an owner and member of lots of groups, I’d like to be able to go to the page where you can see a list of all your groups and put a name in a search box to find it rather than have to scroll through each page. I’d also like to be able to put them in an order that means something to me rather than just alphabetical (or whatever the other option is currently).
I’ll give some more thought to other things I’d like to see and add them here later. Thanks for being responsive and allowing us to add our thoughts to this blog.
Desi
@Bill, We do use the Yahoo! Calendar system for groups, and no, you are not alone in your problems. They are making some major improvements to that product so we hope to see many of these issues resolved soon.
Best,
Leonard