Starting today, you’ll notice a few more changes to Yahoo! Groups. This includes: changes to CAPTCHA, the ability to post from the owner address, and a fix for the problem preventing some users from being able to moderate groups via email. More details can be found below.

CAPTCHA

We know that transcribing and translating the CAPTCHA codes can be difficult. As of today, we’re updating to a new CAPTCHA implementation, which includes the ability to refresh codes you can’t decipher (versus being forced to try and fail), and the option of using an audio CAPTCHA for those who are visually impaired. Not sure what CAPTCHA is? Find out more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

Posting from the Owner Address

One of the most common requests we get from Moderators is the ability to post messages from the owner address (as opposed to the moderator’s personal address). This feature will now allow moderators to mail to group members using the GROUPNAME-owner@yahoogroups.com address, giving moderators and owners the option to post in a way that clearly delineates them as moderators. Group owners and moderators already have the option of rejecting messages from the owner address, a feature we pushed a few weeks ago.
Moderation by Email

Also in today’s release is a fix for group moderators who were having issues approving pending messages via email. Moderators affected by this issue were using email clients that (in violation of internet standards) do not honor case in reply to addresses, meaning that they would turn upper case letters into lowercase.  Since the codes that enable email moderation to work relied on the reply address being the exact sequence of characters we were expecting, email moderation commands did not work for these users.  But we have now updated our code in a way that will enable email moderation to work for even these email clients, which should allow moderators to approve pending messages and members via email once again.

As we continue to push out new fixes and releases, we’ll keep you posted!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

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

Back in April, the ability to edit your membership information within a group was frozen as a result of changes to the profiles system on Yahoo! (See screenshot* below for clarification) Prior to April, you were able to edit the information that displayed in black beneath your name within the Members section of your group. However, many of you reported that after April the information displayed here was no longer correct (as you have moved, changed your name or had a birthday), or, you simply just didn’t want it to show at all, but were unable to edit these fields.

*= screenshot shows member page in “Expanded” view

Starting today, this feature will no longer be visible to group members or moderators as we are removing it altogether. Instead, when viewing the membership page, you’ll notice that only the user’s ID (or alias), status icon, message link, and the edit icon appear. (See screenshot* below for example)

*= screenshot shows member page in “Expanded” view

This feature will not be gone for forever, as we’re working internally to ensure that the information revealed is both correct, and what you want to share.

If you’re a moderator who previously used this information to verify a group member’s age, you will no longer be able to do this by glancing at your membership list. However, you will be able to click on a user’s name and will be taken directly to that user’s profile (if they’ve opted to make their profile public).

It’s important to note that as a moderator you will never be asked to verify a user’s age (especially if you’re running an adult group and wish to ensure that people under the age of 18 are not attempting to join). This “check” is done automatically by Yahoo’s systems: if someone is under the age of 18, they will not be able to access a site that is intended for mature audiences.

But if you’re simply looking for a way to keep up with your members, and, learn a bit more about your group members, you have a few options:

Request that group members have a “public” and complete profile when attempting to join your group

Create a file that is sent out to all new members, asking them to provide additional information about themselves

Add the “Group Profile” application to your group. (To do this, you must be a moderator or owner.)

To add this application, click on “Applications” in the left hand column of your group (1).

Then, click “Browse Applications” (2)

Locate“Group Profile” (3) from the list and click “Add” (4).

When the pop-up appears, give the application a name and description (5) and click “OK” (6).

Once your description has been saved, you’ll be taken back to the Add/Remove Applications page. From here, click on the “Group Profile” link** to be taken to your new application (7).

**= If you changed the name of the application in step 5, that name will display instead of “Group Profile.”

Here you can either click “Add Entry” (8) to begin adding your information into the preset form, or, you can click on the “Settings” page to begin customizing the fields for your group’s profile (9).

We know this is an important feature for many group members and moderators and assure you that this feature is not gone forever! We will be sure to update you here as soon as the member detail feature returns.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager