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

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: 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

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.

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

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/

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

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

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

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