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

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

UPDATE: For info on the “cookie” error message, please see this post

UPDATE: Site is back up. Thanks for your patience!

We’re aware that the groups site (and all of your groups) are currently unavailable. We’re currently working on the fix and will be sure to update you as soon as the issue has been resolved. In the interim you may see error messages like ” internal error – server connection terminated” or “connection refused” or may experience extremely slow load times. Thank you for your patience while we resolve these problems.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved.

We’ve been made aware of the fact that users who have their mail settings set to “digest” are currently receiving digests after just two or three messages. Typically digests are sent out at the close of the day, or, once the group hits 25 messages– whichever comes first.

The team is aware of the issue and is currently working on a fix. We’ll keep you posted, but in the meantime, please accept our apologies for the truncated digests.

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

October may be nearly over but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to think about breast health. As many of you may know, October is national Breast Cancer Awareness month, and all across the globe men and women alike are working together to raise awareness and work to find a cure for this disease.

Here at Yahoo! you can make a small difference by updating your status message in support of the men and women battling this disease, and, the people who love them.

For each person who updates their Yahoo! status in Yahoo! Shine (http://shine.yahoo.com/page/breast-cancer-awareness-2009) and Yahoo! Mail (http://mail.yahoo.com) during the month of October, Yahoo! will donate $1 to the National Breast Cancer Foundation (http://www.nationalbreastcancer.org) to provide free mammograms for uninsured women (up to $50,000).

To check out just how supportive the Yahoo! Network is, stop by the support map on Shine http://shine.yahoo.com/page/breast-cancer-awareness-2009 , or, join any one of the many Yahoo! Groups dedicated to supporting those affected by Breast Cancer on a daily basis.

Thanks for your support, and be sure to act quickly—there are only a few days left!

For more information on this initiative, please check out the Yodel Anecdotal Post, found here: http://ycorpblog.com/2009/10/01/update-your-status-to-fight-breast-cancer/

Users with Hotmail and @yahoo.com.sg accounts may be experiencing difficulties when trying to send or receive group emails. We’re aware of both of these issues and are working to resolve them.

Hotmail: users may be experiencing delays when receiving group emails.

@yahoo.com.sg: Some users with @yahoo.com.sg accounts are reporting that they’re not receiving all messages. UPDATE: This issue has been resolved. If you are still experiencing problems, please contact Customer Care.

If you are experiencing an issue other than the one listed here, please contact Customer Care. As soon as we have an update on either one of these issues we’ll be sure to update you here.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

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

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: This issue has been resolved. Thanks for your patience!

We’ve received several reports of groups failing to show updates within the group header. This issue only impacts the header/activity summary within a group– message delivery and activity is not impacted by this issue.

We’re aware of this issue and are currently working to fix it as soon as possible. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we know more.

If you’re experiencing an issue other than this, please be sure to report the problem to Customer Care: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/forms/general.html

Thanks for your patience!

-Melissa

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

The next time you visit http://groups.yahoo.com or your group’s home page you might notice that things look a little different. Starting today, all of the properties across the Yahoo! network are switching over to a new header. This new header reflects our new, purple logo, and, provides users with faster access to some of the most trafficked properties on the network.

Previously, the header looked like this (account drop-down shown):

But now, you’ll notice it looks like this:

With the new header, the links to “sign out” and “help” have been moved over to the left (1). Clicking on the “Hi, [Your name]” on the left hand side will still produce the account drop-down. This gives you quick access to your profile, contacts and account info.

Additionally, we’ve added in a few quick links to other popular properties across the web. From left to right, the new links take you to: the Yahoo! homepage ,your Yahoo! Mail account, your my.yahoo.com page, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Sports. (2)

We hope you enjoy the new header, and, the new purple look!

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

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