UPDATE: The internal error message has been resolved. Thanks for your patience!

Currently there are two issues some groups may be experiencing:

Internal error message

Some of you started reporting early today that you were seeing the following message

Network Timeout

The server at groups.yahoo.com is taking too long to respond.

The requested site did not respond to a connection request and the browser has stopped waiting for a reply.

* Could the server be experiencing high demand or a temporary outage? Try again later.
* Are you unable to browse other sites? Check the computer’s network connection.
* Is your computer or network protected by a firewall or proxy? Incorrect settings can interfere with Web browsing.
* Still having trouble? Consult your network administrator or Internet provider for assistance.

We’re looking into the issue, and as soon as we have more information we’ll keep you updated.

Stale photo updates/counts

Some of you may have noticed that on your groups homepage that the number of new photos uploaded is incorrect. We’re aware of this issue and are currently working to resolve this problem.

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

We’re currently aware of the issues that several of you are reporting concerning photos, files, and email. We will update this post as soon as these issues have been resolved, or we have more information to share with you all. In the meantime, these remain top priorities of our engineering teams.

Photos: When creating a new photo album, or uploading new photos to an existing album, the images are not displaying (or show a “red x” despite a successful upload. UPDATE: This issue has been resolved. If you are still seeing this problem, please contact Customer Care.

File access: over the past few days some of you were having trouble accessing your files, and were often receiving an error message. UPDATE: This issue has been resolved. If you are still seeing this problem, please contact Customer Care.

Email delay/posting issues: In a handful of groups, members and moderators are noticing a delay when sending or receiving group messages. (Additionally a few groups have reported that some messages are not posting at all). UPDATE: For more information on this issue please the post found here: http://www.ygroupsblog.com/blog/2009/10/12/groups-mail-delivery-hotmail-yahoo-sg-accounts/

Message search: We know we’re long overdue for a lengthy post about this, but the short story is, we’re currently waiting on new hardware that will support all of the messages and groups on the Yahoo! Groups system. In the meantime we are slowly moving over a small amount of groups each week to the new message search system. We know that you all have been incredibly patient with us– this is greatly appreciated.

Login Requests: A handful of you are still reporting that you’re still repeatedly being asked to log in. Please report this issue to Customer Care, using this link: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/general.html and provide your browser and operating system information. Please also let us know whether or not you are experiencing this issue on other Yahoo! properties (ex: Mail, Finance, Buzz, etc.)

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE– September 14, 2009 @ 3pm PT: We believe we have found the root of this problem and have fixed the issue. However, if you are still seeing this issue please leave a comment below and/or email me directly at yahoogroups[at] yahoo-inc[dot] com. In the email, please include your browser and operating system information (what version, etc.) so we can better diagnose the problem. Thanks!

Several of you have reported that when visiting your groups, you’re repeatedly asked to enter your password in order for you to proceed. While this is the expected behavior if you haven’t logged in two weeks, or, are attempting to add users to your group, this should not be happening when you’re simply trying to access a group or post a message through the web.

We are currently investigating this issue, but believe that users who recently upgraded to the newest version of Firefox (3.5.2 or 3.5.3) are impacted by this problem. Additionally, users of IE 7 and 8 are also reporting problems. We are currently investigating the issue for all browsers and are working to resolve the problem as soon as possible.

Until the issue is resolved, we suggest using a different browser for the time-being (some users have reported stability when using alternate browsers). Or, you may participate in your groups by posting messages via email.

If you are experiencing other issues (member lists not updating, etc.) please also contact Customer Care as that is likely a separate problem.

Customer Care: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/general.html

We’ll be sure to update you all here as soon as we have more information and/or the issue is resolved. Thanks for your patience!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

In an effort to tackle spammers, we’ve deleted millions of spam groups in the last few weeks. Unfortunately, because of a bug, on Monday morning thousands of recently created legitimate groups were deleted along with the spam groups.

All of these groups have been restored and should now be accessible.  Thank you for your patience while we sorted out the issue and restored your groups.

If you are able to access your group (by using the URL) but do not see it on your “My Groups” page, try running the membership wizard (instructions can be found here) to add it to your “My Groups” page.

However, if you are still having problems finding your groups or are experiencing any other issues, please contact Customer Care for help:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/forms_index.html

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Update (7/9 4:30 pm PDT;  11:30 pm GMT): Pending notifications and email commands should now be going working normally again (although unlike messages these notifications and commands are not queued, so ones that did not go out during that period will not do so; the implication is that pending messages and members during that time will have to be approved on the web and those trying to subscribe/unsubscribe/changes settings via email will have to resend their requests).

Update (7/9 10:15 am PDT; 7/9 5:15 pm GMT): We’re looking into reports of  email notification of pending members/messages/photos (as well as the confirmation messages for email commands like subscribe and unsubscribe) not being delivered.

Update (7/8 10:30 pm PDT; 7/9 5:30 am GMT): The logs problem has again been resolved and the backlog has been cleared.

In the last six weeks we have posted on the blog about a number of bugs. Here is a quick summary of the status of each of these issues:

BUGS STILL OPEN:

- Delays in Processing Activity Logs: This problem was resolved at the end of last week but returned (though on a much smaller scale) yesterday morning. The good news is that the queues are now headed in the right direction (in other words, the backlog is getting smaller), but we are currently still running about 10 hours behind.

- Message Search: Over the last two weeks, progress on the message search bug has been gated by the logs issue, both because the new message search system is dependent on “the queue” working correctly and because the same team is responsible for both systems. So as soon as the logs issue is fully resolved, this team will begin to migrate more groups on to the new message search system.

- Groups Being Recategorized as Adult: Despite a great deal of effort, we have not yet discovered the cause of the bug that is causing groups to be wrongly misclassified as adult, so we are still working on this problem. In the mean time, we have halted all advertising in adult groups until the issue is resolved.

- Text Disappearing in Some Messages Replies: This problem is being caused by the way some versions of Outlook (as well as Juno Mail) are formatting replies to messages (they are inserting the text of the reply in the wrong place, which is causing the script in Groups which deletes olds headers and footers to delete this text as well).. We have developed a potential fix that we are currently testing in QA, but users can also address the problem themselves by changing their subscription from “fully featured” to “traditional”.

NOTE: You can find information, including suggested work arounds, for other known issues here:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/issues/

RESOLVED BUGS

- Program Initialization/Temporarily Unavailable Errors: This problem has been resolved.

- Problems with Photos Uploads (50% Failure Rates): This problem has been resolved.

- Moderator Unable to Change Home Page Photos: This problem has been resolved.

- Yahoo! Mail UK Delivery Issues: This problem has been resolved.

- Messages Not Wrapping on the Preview Page: This problem has been resolved.

- New Attachments Feature Disabled (or settings changing): This problem has been resolved.

- Verizon & Comcast Delivery Issues: Not actually a Yahoo! Groups bug (the delivery issues were on their end), but based on the fact that we are no longer getting frequent reports of delivery problems to these ISPs, we believe the problem has been resolved.

Update (7/3 12:30 pm PDT; 7:30 pm GMT): The problem has been fully resolved. Logs should now be functioning normally.

Update (7/2 9:30 am PDT; 4:30 pm GMT): Further good news on the logs. We’re now only about 24 hour behind and barring any new problems, engineering expects us to be fully caught up by tomorrow.

Update: There is some positive news on the logs front. The backlog is now at 50% of its peak level, which puts us on a pace to be fully caught up by this weekend (currently, activity through the 27th should be captured in the logs). However, one point to be aware of: the time stamp on the logs is showing as the time that the logs were processed in the queue, not as the time the activity took place. Which means that until this backlog is processed and we’re caught up, the time stamps on logs will not correspond to the time the activity took place. Admittedly this is not ideal (we recognize the time stamps should reflect the time the activity actually took place), but we’re not going to try fixing this until after we have everything working normally again.

Here are updates on three problems affecting significant numbers of groups or users.

GROUP ACTIVITY LOGS AND RECENT ACTIVITY NOT UPDATING
As many moderators have probably noticed, the “Group Activity” logs in the Management section have not been updating. The team has been working closely with Tibco, the company behind a key piece of software that Groups relies on to process our incredible volume of these logs, to address the issue, but the problem is not yet solved. And while the work will continue over the weekend (it’s 7:30 pm on Friday in California as I write this), I wouldn’t expect this issue to be resolved before some time next week.

Unfortunately, the queuing system that processes these logs is also the system that updates the “recent activity” module (on group home pages, the Groups Front Page, and My Groups), so this module will be out of date as well until the logs problem is resolved.

MESSAGE SEARCH UPDATE
We’re painfully aware that this is the bug that will not die. And while there is some good news, it’s balanced by some not as good news (caused mainly by the logs problem):
- The Good News: Approximately 8000 groups have been migrated to the new message search system and for these groups, message search is working correctly again (with a couple caveats described in the Bad News below).

- The Bad News I: The new message system also relies on the same queuing system as the logs. So messages posted since the logs began to backlog (for most groups on the 19th) won’t appear in search, even for groups on the new system.
- The Bad News II: No additional groups can be migrated until the queuing system is fixed.
- The Bad News III: A couple (of the nine) servers the new message search system is running on are behaving flakily. So sometimes it may be necessary to repeat a search a couple of the time to get the right results (though we hope to address that problem soon).

VERIZON AND COMCAST DELIVERY ISSUES
We began receiving reports today that some Verizon and Comcast users are again having trouble receiving messages from Yahoo! Groups. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to address this issues. We are sending the messages to Verizon and Comcast users, but the ISPs are either bouncing them, delaying them, or dropping them entirely. And this despite the fact that we have filled out (multiple times) the information that Verizon and Comcast ask for in these situations.

At this point, the only thing that is likely to help the problem is for enough Groups users to complain to Verizon and Comcast so that they feel compelled to take action. And when you do complain, there are three things you can do to make it more likely your complaint will be acted upon:

1. If there is information about your latest bounced message on your “bounce history page”, send it along with your complaint.
http://groups.yahoo.com/member/preferences/communication/bounce_history?email=YOUREMAILADDRESS (is the direct link to your bounce history)
2. If the problem is messages being delayed (rather than not delivered), send them the full headers of some of your delayed messages.
3. Point them to this group, which is designed for ISP Admins:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ygmailadmin/

We’re sorry for the hassle and inconvenience these problems cause.

- Gordon
Yahoo! Groups

P.S. As always, if you need help from beyond Yahoo! beyond the information in this post, your only option is to contact Customer Care:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/ownmod/forms/forms_index.html

While we read comments on the blog, we do NOT take action on individual complaints. The ONLY way to get individual help is to contact Customer Care.

UPDATE ON MESSAGE SEARCH (6/8 3:00 pm PDT/11:00 pm GMT): The good news is that the new message search is working correctly on one of our new production search servers. The bad news is that it’s not yet working correctly on all of them. Once this last issue is resolved, we will migrate groups that have signed up on to the new system. Our apologies for the delay.

Below is an update on our highest priority bugs, all of which our engineering team is actively working to squash.  Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve these issues, and we’re sorry for any hassles these bugs have caused you and your groups.

- Gordon
Yahoo! Groups

P.S. If you would like to report additional issues not mentioned below, please contact Customer Care . While we do read all comments, we need the information that the Customer Care form collects to be able to properly investigate a bug.

TOP PRIORITY BUGS

MESSAGE SEARCH PROBLEMS
This is our number one priority bug since it’s affecting so many groups and has no work around. As folks who read the blog know, we have been working hard to rebuild our message search system for a number of months .

The Bad News: The final phases of the this project have proved trickier than expected, which is why we haven’t met our goal of having groups that have signed up to be migrated on the new system by mid-May.

The Good News: Talked again with the engineer leading this project this morning, and he believes we’re very close to being able to roll out the new system more broadly. In fact, he hopes to solve the last remaining issues and actually begin migrating more groups as early as tomorrow (Wednesday, May 26th),  although I think Thursday (Pacific Time) is more realistic.  And assuming he encounters no unexpected problems, we should still be able to have all groups that have signed up to be migrated on the new system by the end of the month.

PROGRAM INITIALIZATION OR TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE ERRORS
We know that many groups are seeing this error when they land on the group home page or pending messages page. Usually, the error will go away if you refresh the page, but if the problem persists despite multiple refreshes, please contact Customer Care .

GROUPS BEING MISTAKENLY CLASSIFIED AS ADULT
There has been an ongoing known issue where groups are mistakenly recategorized behind the "adult wall" (meaning that no one under 18 can access). And while annoying, until recently Customer Care has been able to fix this mistake quickly for affected groups (when it is brought to their attention).

But in the past few weeks, for a handful of groups, the problem has become much more frustrating because they are being reclassified as adult every single day. In other words, the problem is being fixed by Customer Care, but a bug is causing the group is to placed back behind the adult wall again the next day.

We are working hard to identify what is triggering this bug (it has nothing to do with the content of the group), but as of yet have not identified the root cause. Once we do, we will roll out a fix. In the mean time, if your group is being affected by this issue, please let Customer Care know , and they will manually fix your group every day until the problem stops.

NEW TEXT DISAPPEARING IN MESSAGE REPLIES
When replying to group messages, some users are experiencing problems with the text they typed not displaying in their reply message.  Instead only the text of the message they are replying to is displaying.

The problem appears to be mainly affecting users of Outlook (and apparently Juno Web Mail), and it is only affecting replies to certain messages. We know the problem is related to HTML formatting issues, but we are still investigating the precise root cause and how to resolve the issue.

For more information, including suggested work arounds, see our "known issue" page here .

MODERATORS UNABLE TO CHANGE THE GROUP HOME PAGE PHOTO
Some moderators are currently getting errors when they try to update their group’s home page photo. Please contact Customer Care if this problem is affecting you.

We should be able to manually fix the problem for your group right away (though it may take us longer to roll out a more global fix that will prevent the problem from occurring in the first place).

PROBLEMS UPLOADING PHOTOS
Some users are reporting problems uploading photos, with only half the photos they submit being successfully uploaded in any given upload attempt. If this problem is affecting you, please contact Customer Care .

Over the past few weeks several of you have asked for an update on the new attachment feature and message search issue.  Below, you’ll find a quick update on these two items.

Attachment Feature: On March 31st we announced that the new attachment feature would gradually be enabled on all groups. Since then, many of you have seen, tested, and commented on this new feature. We are still in the process of rolling out the new attachment store option to all groups (currently there are over 10 million groups on Yahoo!) and we appreciate your patience while we incorporate new groups into the mix.

Message Search: We know that for those of you plagued by message search issues this has been an incredibly difficult issue to deal with over the past few weeks/months. We appreciate your patience and are happy to inform you that we will begin moving over all of the groups who have reported issues with the message search feature in the next two weeks. If you have reported your group (either to Customer Care, or, using the survey link found here ), your group will be moved over during the middle of May. Remaining groups will be moved over once affected groups have been migrated over to the new solution.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Thank you all for your patience during this week’s outage. We wanted to keep you updated on a few issues that may be impacting your experience on groups.

Missing Groups
After Monday’s maintenance a few of you have reported that some of your groups were “missing” from your groups list. If you are missing any of your groups please go through the Membership Wizard, found here: http://groups.yahoo.com/memwiz This will detect any groups registered to your ID’s. Once you’ve completed the Membership Wizard any "missing" groups should return to your groups list.

AOL Users
We’re receiving reports from some moderators and users that some AOL users are not receiving messages from Yahoo! Groups and are being put into bouncing status. For more information on this issue and information on how to “unbounce” yourself, please go here : http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/issues/aol.html

New Members Not Showing Up
If there are members who have recently joined your group but do not show up in your Membership List, please report this issue to Customer Care, as this is a bug. When reporting the issue to Customer Care please provide a list of the missing members. To report this issue, please go here : http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/forms_index.html

Message Search
While we know that many of you are disappointed that this week’s maintenance did not include a fix to the message search issue, we are happy to report that we will be pushing out a fix to ALL groups in the next month that should resolve this problem. Currently groups that are affected by this bug are not returning search results altogether, or, may not be returning complete results. If your group meets these criteria, please register your group here : http://surveylink.yahoo.com/wix/p6290938.aspx and it will be one of the first groups migrated over to the new Message Search next month.

UPDATE: If your group is having search issues please use this link to report your issues to the team. Groups will be moved over again towards the middle of May . Reporting your group using this link will ensure that your group is one of the first to be moved over.

As always, please stay up to date on the latest issues by checking the blog, our Twitter stream, or the Known Issues page in the Help section. If you’re having an issue that isn’t addressed here or in the help section, please report the issue to Customer Care so we can investigate the issue further.

Thanks!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager