Several of you have reported that when using Safari on a Mac the new “Updates” feature within your groups you’re unable to get past the pop-up to post your message.

If this is happening to you, here’s how you can solve the problem:

Upgrade Safari
This “persistent pop-up” is only happening with the beta version of Safari (3.0.4). To upgrade your browser, please go here: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ or, click on the Apple icon in the top left corner and click on “Software Update” to check for the latest version of Safari.

Disable the update prompts
To do this, go to the My Groups page: http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups and click on “Edit My Groups.” From here, you can manually change your updates settings, or, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and change all of the settings for the groups on that page, at once. (Click on the image below to enlarge)

Or, you can always post via email.

If you’ve made these changes and are still having trouble, or, are using a browser other than Safari and are having this problem, please be sure to report these issues to Customer Care.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Back in May we announced that Yahoo! Groups would begin publishing “Updates” about your activity within Groups. Upon launch, this new addition to Yahoo! Groups created an update when you uploaded an image to an open group but it did not notify your connections when you posted a message to your group.

Starting now, you’ll have the option of sharing your message updates with your connections on Yahoo!. For those of you concerned with privacy, it’s important to note that this is a completely optional feature. If you don’t want to share, you don’t have to.

For members, Message Updates are a way to offer more exposure to the content you have created and to effortlessly let your friends know what you have been up to.

For moderators, Message Updates can drive new members and increase the level of activity in your groups.

SUMMARY

• Updates allows an easy way to share your group updates with all your connections (ie. Updates are shown to your connection across Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo! IM, and your profile on Yahoo!)
• Updates is a feature that is fully opt-in per user per group (ie. you can opt-in in one group while remaining opted-out in another)
• Updates is defaulted off for all groups. No updates will be shared unless you explicitly opt-in.
• Updates is not supported for Closed groups, Adult (age restricted) groups, or users using an alias (alternate profile for their group). In other words, it’s not possible to opt-in for these groups.
• For groups that require membership to view content, only Updates to the content being posted will be sent and non-members will still be required to join the group before being able to view the content in detail
• You can delete Updates on a case-by-case basis from your http://profiles.yahoo.com profiles page
• When posting messages only the message subject line and the date and time of the posting is shown in the update– none of the message content is shared to protect your group’s privacy. In order for people to read the full message, you must click on the update and sign in as a group member, if the group is not a public group.

TO GET STARTED
To edit your opt-in/opt-out preferences on a group-by-group basis, visit your My Groups page (http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups ). Then, click on the “Edit My Groups” tab where you’ll be able to adjust your updates settings for each group you’re a member of.

You can opt to “Share my Updates” and “Prompt me before sending updates” or, “Never prompt me before sending updates.”

Once you’ve configured your settings for each of your groups, you can visit the http://profiles.yahoo.com/settings/updates/ page and manage your updates further. (Please note that in order to get to this page you must first complete your profile—you may do this by first going to http://profiles.yahoo.com ).

To find the Yahoo! Groups option, scroll down to the bottom of this page, and then select “Show All Yahoo! Sources.” Clicking on this link will expand a larger list of Yahoo! properties, including several Yahoo! Groups properties.

Once you’ve located Yahoo! Groups, set your sharing preferences using the drop-down menu to the right (you can share your updates with “Anyone” “My Connections” or “No One”).

Then, click Save.

Changing your preferences will move Yahoo! Groups up from this bottom “Show All Yahoo! Sources” group, to the top “Share My Updates” group—making it easier for you to manage your Yahoo! Groups updates in a flash.

Once you’ve configured your privacy settings accordingly, return to your favorite group and test it out by posting a message.

Should you want to completely opt out of Yahoo! Groups Updates, ensure that all of your Group settings are set to “Never” share my updates (this setting is found on the “My Groups” page) and, that on your profiles page, you have set your Yahoo! Groups settings to be viewable by “No One.”

For more details on privacy, profiles, and more, please visit the Profiles News Blog (and this particular post that was initially written for Answers users, but covers major questions and concerns regarding profiles and privacy).

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

Update 8/6/09 7:00 pm PDT; 2:00 am GMT (8/7): The RepDB problem has been fully resolved and the system is again functioning normally for all groups on all four database clusters. We appreciate the patience people showed as we worked through this issue.

(Note: If you are still seeing problems in your groups, they have another cause. Please contact Customer Care so that we can investigate.)

This blog post was originally titled “New members not showing up on the member list”, but the problem is actually broader than that and I wanted to take a moment to fully explain.

As background, for groups with 350 or more members, Yahoo! Groups uses a “replicated database system“, which is a key component of the backend systems that have allowed Yahoo! Groups to scale to the size it has (100+ million users across more than 12 million groups, with some groups having more than a million members)

Unfortunately, we have a bug at the moment that is causing our “RepDB system” to back up and process incredibly slowly (most affected groups have not had a RepDB update since late on the 7/17). The impact on affected groups includes the following:

• The member list will be out of date with new members not yet appearing on the list (though they will appear in the management logs, which are fully up to date), making it impossible for moderators to change the settings (or remove) these members.
• Members who are not showing up on the member list will also not receive messages via email (although they can still read messages on the web or post via email).
• Members who have recently unsubscribed (but who were set to receive individual emails or digests) will continue to receive messages from the group until the RepDB system is up to date.
• Changes to email settings will not take effect.
• Members who have been reactivated out of bouncing status will still not get email.
• Exports from the member list will not be up to date (although “downloads” will be).

Apologies for the hassles we know this is causing. Solving this problem is the team’s top priority.

- Gordon Strause
Yahoo! Groups

UPDATE (7/16: 4:55 pm PDT; 11:55 pm GMT): The outage is complete.  If you are still having problems accessing your group (or other issues), please contact Customer Care. All comments to the blog are read by the team, but only Customer Care can actually provide support.

UPDATE: The outage scheduled for Wednesday, July 15, will not take place. Instead, on Thursday, July 16th, there will be a site-wide outage impacting all Yahoo! Groups.

During this time, you will not be able to access any of your groups, and, mail will be delayed. Once the site is back up, mail delivery will resume. This outage will start at about 3pm PT (10pm UTC/GMT-to determine what time the outage will take place in your neighborhood, please visit this link: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html) and should last roughly 2 hours.

This week (July 14, 15, and 16), we’ll be performing maintenance on the remaining 75% of Yahoo! Groups that were not affected by last Wednesday’s outage.

This maintenance will take place over a three-day TWO DAY period (July 14, 15, and 16), as we’ll be working on 25% of Yahoo! Groups at a time. This means you may be able to access some of your groups, but not all, during the outages. For the affected groups, mail will be delayed, but will return to normal once the outage is complete.

All of the outages will take place at 3pm PT (10pm UTC/GMT-to determine what time the outage will take place in your neighborhood, please visit this link: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html) on the 14th, 15th, and 16th.

While we know that outages sometimes seem to come at exactly the wrong time, we again hope to have these next three done within 2 hours.

Once the maintenance has been completed, we’ll update this post.

Thanks for your patience!

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 (7/8 3:50 pm PDT, 10:50 GMT): Maintenance is complete.  All groups should again be accessible. Thank you to the affected groups for your patience!

Today, Wednesday, July 8th we will be performing scheduled maintenance on the Yahoo! Groups databases. During this time, some of you may not be able to access your groups, and group mail will be delayed.

Maintenance should take roughly two hours, and will begin at 1pm PT (8pm UTC/GMT- to determine what time the outage will take place in your neighborhood, please visit this link: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html).

Once the maintenance has been completed, we will update this post.

Thanks for your patience!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE (7/02 3:30 pm PDT; 10:30 pm GMT):  The problem has now been resolved and all Mail UK users should now be receiving messages from Yahoo! Groups normally, including the backlog of messages that had not been delivered earlier (if you are still having delivery issues, please contact Mail Customer Care).  Our apologies for the inconvience.

We’re aware of the reports from Yahoo! Mail UK users that they are not receiving messages from their Yahoo! Groups and both the Groups and Mail engineering teams are investigating the problem.  Will update this blog post with more info as we have it.

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.

Did you know that there are more than two thousand groups on Yahoo! Groups dedicated solely to the men and women in the Armed Forces? These include groups dedicated to the men and women in all four branches of the US Armed Forces, groups for Blue Star Moms, and much, much, more.

We know that keeping our troops safe is something many of you find near and dear, which is why Yahoo! recently teamed up with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report and the philanthropic organization, DonorsChoose.org to lend a hand to the children and families of those who support our troops.

Stephen Colbert, DonorsChoose.org and Yahoo! are working together to give the children of military parents a hand in their education and in their communities.

As part of the “Support Our Troops” campaign, launched in partnership with Colbert, DonorsChoose.org is running a friendly competition among the Armed Forces — Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy and Coast Guard – to see which branch’s supporters can have the biggest impact on classrooms. As of today, we have raised more than $130,000, and the Army is barely hanging on to the lead (check out the leaderboard as the tension builds in real-time).

Literally hundreds of projects have been submitted by teachers at military-serving schools across the country in an effort to show students (and parents!) how proud we all are.

If you want to lend a hand to the DonorsChoose.org campaign click here to donate. Can’t? Show your solidarity by dressing up your Avatar on Yahoo! like Stephen Colbert, or, accessorize your own avatar with things like an eagle, bear, Colbert Nation hat, Che Colbert t-shirt, fireplace, and a desk, and help us spread the word about the Support Our Troops campaign.

Also, be sure to check out video clips from the Colbert Report, including one where Colbert shaves his head in support of the troops!

Thanks for your support!

DonorsChoose.org & Yahoo!

UPDATE: The maintenance was complete at 4:15 pm PDT (12:15 am GMT).  If you are still experiencing problems they are unrelated to this maintenance. Please contact Customer Care so that we can look into the problem:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/forms_index.html

On June 11th, 2009 Yahoo! Groups will be undergoing maintenance. During this time 50% of groups will be unavailable for up to an hour. The outage is scheduled to begin some time between 2 and 3 pm PT (10-11 pm GMT).

While the maintenance is going on, all features of affected group, including messages, photos, attachments, etc. will be completely unavailable. However, once the outage concludes, any messages that were posted to these groups via email during this downtime will be distributed.

In an effort to better communicate to all of you, a “blast message” will be posted to all groups later today linking to this blog post. This message will be visible on all groups to all users.

Thank you for your patience—during the outage, this blog will remain up (and comments will remain open), and we will update you all as information becomes available.

- Gordon
Yahoo! Groups