By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups
We’re happy to announce that the group homepage photo is back on the ‘About Group’ page. This was a top ranked idea on the user feedback forum. The group activity summary now appears on top of the ‘About Group’ page.
We took some time to bring it back, as we had to build the enhancement that would allow group owners to change it. As a group owner, you can change the homepage photo by going to Management > Control Panel > About Group .
The homepage photo appears only if it has been added by the owner of the group, on the ‘About Group’ page and is distinct from the Group cover image.
One more thing, clicking on the group name on the left navigation panel opens the ‘About Group’ page, again by popular demand from our users.
Members of a group who are subscribed to the mailing list and have not associated or ‘linked’ their subscription with a Yahoo account are unable to access the web features of Yahoo Groups. From today, we’re making it easier for those users to become full subscribers.
We’ve launched an easy way to link email only subscriptions with a Yahoo account for a signed-in user. So, if you’re signed in to Yahoo and have email-only subscriptions to Yahoo Groups, you’ll be prompted to “link” your subscriptions. All you have to do is click, verify the subscriptions and confirm!
You’ll see this prompt on the “Manage my groups” pages and soon on "All my groups" page as well as the “Groups Home” page as well.
On a related note, Membership wizard aka ‘Memwiz’ can be used to detect group subscriptions a signed in user may have associated with another Yahoo ID or other subscriptions not linked to any specific Yahoo ID. The wizard does this by looking up all registered email addresses associated with a signed-in user’s subscriptions and looking for other subscriptions with any of these email addresses.
'Memwiz' makes it easy to consolidate your group subscriptions with one of your Yahoo accounts.
By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups
Hey moderators, We’re introducing an improved experience. for sending invitations to your group. Copy and paste email addresses of people you wish to invite to your group, separated by commas and we will validate them and send out the invites. You can also see the number of invitations you can send during the current 24 hour time window.
You can use the same invite page to add people to the groups mailing list as well.
By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups
Now moderators can search the activity log. The search function is specific to each type of activity log, namely Mail, Web, Membership, Moderator activity and email commands.
You can target your searches quite precisely. For example, you can search for Web activity – specifically in the Polls section of your group and even search for new polls added in a given date range.
This is an enhancement that Yahoo Groups moderators can use to effectively manage group activities.
By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups
By Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications
Last year, Yahoo released a new Yahoo Groups. Our goal was to make the experience more enjoyable, and modern, for everyone. While many of you liked the new Groups, others felt differently. We read your tweets, posts, comments and emails and we wanted to let you know why we made the change.
Why The Change?
Many of you asked why we needed to change Groups at all. There were two main reasons: infrastructure and flexibility.
Regarding the infrastructure, Groups hadn’t been updated in 12+ years. We had to bring Groups up to date with the modern Internet and Yahoo’s other current products. The previous platform was rapidly aging and it urgently needed an upgrade to ensure future stability. Additionally, by moving Groups onto Yahoo’s current platforms, we’ve been able to improve the speed and reliability of the service which means a better experience for you. (As one example, the page load times have decreased substantially on the new infrastructure.)
From a flexibility perspective, we needed to modernize the interface, and prepare Groups for future improvements. For instance, Groups didn’t perform optimally on smartphones and tablets, which we know is important to a lot of you. We’re now in a better position to make Groups quicker and easier to use while you’re on the go. The other advantage of the upgrade is that we can include things like video, photo and link sharing in a way that makes the overall Groups experience more entertaining.
Moving Forward
We truly appreciate all of your feedback and we will continue to do our best to address it as quickly as possible. As a matter of fact, thanks to many of you and your comments, we’ve made hundreds of changes since the launch.
I want to clearly state that the new Groups is here to stay, but our commitment is to continue to partner with all of you to make it as good as it can be.
If you have questions you’d like to raise to me and the Groups product team, please visit the Groups Town hall .You can read the Q&A and feel free to post new questions ( instructions on how to submit a question are published there) and we’ll answer them as soon as we can.By doing this, my hope is that we can work together to bring the Groups experience to the next level.
Thank you for your continued support of Yahoo Groups.
We’re delighted to share that we’ll begin rolling out the redesigned Yahoo Groups to all countries over the coming days. Users in Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Canada, UK and Ireland will soon see the reinvigorated Groups experience.
We began rolling out the redesign to our US based users a couple of months ago. But for those of you who are seeing it for the first time, here’s a quick overview of what’s new:
- Refreshed Groups site: We’ve given the interface a new, cleaner, modernized look
- Simplified user experience: Do more in fewer steps. For example, you can now create a new Group in two simple steps rather than seven
- New home page: Your groups are now listed in the left rail and you can access them in one click. You can also see all the recent updates in your Groups from the new “Groups Home” page
- New “All my Groups” Page : “All My Groups” gives you a snapshot of the activity in all of your groups for the last 7 days and allows moderators to see pending items for each of their groups
- Conversations: “Messages” are now called “Conversations”. You’ll notice the new threaded conversation experience. We hope you find it easy to manage your different conversation threads.
- New Photo experience: View or download your group’s photos in the completely redesigned photos section.
- Optimized Moderator tools: We’ve optimized the moderator Control Panel to help moderators do more in fewer steps. Control who join and view content posted in your group in a single click using our present Group types “Public”, “Restricted” or “Private”.
- In-line Video Playback: View video links directly within your groups. Just post a link from any of the supported sites and you’ll see the option to play the video in the message.
For more, see our brief overview video. You can also take the quick product tour that we’ve published on the homepage.
We hope you enjoy the new Groups experience and we’re continuing to work on making improvements and adding new features. Please continue to help us improve by sharing your feedback with us on our our feedback forum.
-Yahoo! Groups Team
We’re delighted to share that we’ve launched an enhancement to the pending approvals feature for moderators. This is the latest in a host of enhancements and fixes that we’ve been rolling out based on your feedback. Check out the list below of some of the things we’ve been working on.
1. Revamped pending messages approval tab
- As a moderator, you can now see all messages pending for approval in one page. On each message you can now approve, reject, edit and save, reject with reply to sender or mark as spam.
2. Enhanced messages list view
- Ability to view larger message preview
3. Ability to multi-select and delete messages, for moderators
- Use checkboxes to select messages to delete in bulk.
4. “View source” option on messages
- View HTML version of message posted while reading messages
5. Download link on Photos
- View or download images by using the download link on photos
6. Accessibility improvements
- Improved performance with screen readers
7. Scheduled Notifications Improvements
- Scheduled files now all show under notifications in the Control Panel
Thank you for all the feedback you’ve shared with us since we launched the redesign. We’ve been listening closely to it and it has been crucial in helping us prioritize enhancements and fixes. Please continue to share your feedback with us on our feedback forum.
- The Yahoo Groups team
You can now view video links directly within your groups. Just post a link from any of the supported sites below, and you’ll see the option to play the video in the message. 
The supported video sites are:
- 1. Yahoo Video
- 2. Youtube
- 3. Vimeo
- 4. Daily Motion
- 5. Meta cafe
Please try it out and share your feedback and suggestions on our Feedback Forum: http://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451
-The Yahoo Groups team
We’ve been listening to your feedback and one of the features you’ve been asking for is the ability to see all the activity in your groups in one place. Today we’re announcing “All My Groups” – a new feature that gives you a bird’s-eye view of all the action happening in your group for the last 7 days.
You can access the “All My Groups” page from the right rail on your Groups homepage, under your list of groups.
The page details all activity for the last 7 days in each of your groups as well as any pending approvals for the groups you moderate. Click on any of the activity items to view those actions within each group or to review the pending approvals.
Your groups are listed in alphabetical order by default, but you can choose to reorder by membership type. So, you can have all the groups you own and moderate first, followed by the groups you are a member of.
To reorder by membership click on the “Membership” header.
We’d love to hear your feedback about the new “All my Groups” page. Please tell us what you think on our feedback forum.
-The Yahoo Groups team
