shalf

No Blog posts since October.

http://yahoogroups.tumblr.com/

No Yahoo activity in the Feedback forum since November.

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451

The Groups Townhall hasn't seen any action since March.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/groupstownhall...

It's nice to see there's still Groups-related staff responding here in Answers (Hi Echo!), but it seems like the development team has gone silent.

A multitude of Feedback items were closed over the weekend (Oct 26th) with the only Admin comment being "We're unable to work on your request." That statement begs the obvious question: why not?

The speculative answers that come to mind are not very positive for Yahoo Groups as a product (the development staff has been let go or re-assigned; we couldn't understand the request and didn't care enough to ask for clarification; we've suffered an overwhelming technical difficulty; ...).

Rather than invite speculation, it would be helpful if Yahoo could give better responses to these items.

If the inability is "at this time" then perhaps the items should be given a status that leaves them open rather than stating that the issue will never be resolved.

A member of one of my groups attempted to post by email but got this bounce back from yahoogroups.com:

> 4.7.1 [TS03] All messages from 82.165.159.130 will be permanently

> deferred; Retrying will NOT succeed. See

> http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts03.html

The content of the page at postmaster.yahoo.com indicates that the email server at the cited IP address is effectively blacklisted from posting to Yahoo (Groups, or maybe both Groups and Mail). The IP address is for an email server at an email service, not the member's computer, so presumably the blacklisting could affect any Groups user with an address at that email service.

There's a cognitive dissonance in that message. It has a 4.7.1 reply code yet the text says "Retrying will NOT succeed". On the cited page there is a link to "best practices for senders" where it advises one to retry after a 4xx reply code because "This is a temporary error."

So... the advice is "Retry because it is a temporary error, but don't expect it to succeed because messages from that IP address will be permanently deferred."?

What advice do I give this member? Should he be bringing such bounces to the attention of his email service provider, or should he just retry the post and get on with life?

The Feedback item "Missing options at Schedule Options at Files Section" has been declined.

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-group...

The only thing I can imagine is that the Admin who declined it did not understand what it meant. This is a straightforward request to correct an error on the UI for editing Files. Contrary to what the Admin said, It is not an "enhancement" - the functionality already exists via the Notifications tab of the control panel. That it is missing from the Edit File page must be a simple oversight in the coding of that page.

Yahoo Groups shouldn't be quirky and idiosyncratic, requiring expert knowledge of all the hidden work-arounds. But that's what this UI inconsistency is. Yahoo Groups ought to be simple and obvious to administer as well as to use.

We want our groups to be awesome. Yahoo, don't you?

Oftentimes an answer could be improved if the asker provides additional details.

I used to use RSS to subscribe to any question I answered, so that I could look at the feed to see if there had been any other answers, updates, or comments. RSS has been eliminated, so how does one do this?

The "My Answers" list doesn't have an indicator for questions that have been updated, which means I'd have to click through to every question and try to recognize whether there's new info there, so that's not a solution.

I was trying to report a bug with the scroll in Groups Photo Albums, but twice when I submitted the form I got "The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server." The third time I got "This web page is not available".

I tried again just now and the Step 1 box wouldn't fill in with Topics. Couldn't proceed from there.

So I added my report as a comment to an existing Feedback item:

"can only see 40 photos per album"

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-group...

A member of GroupManagersForum noticed that many of the Suggestions he had made recently disappeared from the Feedback forum for Groups on UserVoice:

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-group...

Looking at the forum, sorted by "New ideas", one normally sees mostly bottom-ranked suggestions. That is, those with only a few votes because they've just been posted and no one else has voted on them yet.

A few days ago the bottom rank were in the realm of 1600th or so. Now the lowest I see is a large tie for 150th, and a next-place tie for 93rd. So that implies that there remain only a few more than 150 suggestions (150 plus the number that tied for that position) where before there had been at least 1600. Notably, I didn't receive a rash of "completed", "declined" or other notifications. So all these ideas, suggestions, bug reports and other feedback items apparently disappeared without a trace.

Ouch.

Another bit of evidence is that suddenly I have many votes available, whereas normally I'm running on empty. I had been doling them out one at a time among all the worthy bug reports and suggestions I run across, so I haven't had this many available votes since I first signed up. I'm certain that none of the votes I got back were cast frivolously. That is, I had good reason to cast each and every one of them, not just those cast for my own suggestions.

Now I'm rather offended by Yahoo's apparent disregard for its user's time and energy spent writing, reading and ranking the entries in the Feedback Forum. Is there any chance that this massive loss of time and effort can be recovered?

One of my items on the Feedback forum was marked COMPLETED. But the marking is in error - the item is not completed.

Is it sufficient to notify Yahoo of the error by adding a comment to the item, or do I need to enter it again as a new item?

This is the item:

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-group...

My understanding was that with the roll-out of the New groups experience ("Neo") that the Feedback Forum is now the correct place for new feature suggestions.

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-group...

However a recent email response from a Customer Care incident included in its boilerplate language a link to the old Groups Suggestion Board:

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=groups

That's an oversight that should be corrected if the board is not monitored.

I went and looked there, and didn't spot any replies this year from Yahoo or other indications that Yahoo is still monitoring that board. But of course it is possible that Customer Care or the Groups Team are reading it without comment.

cf:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201307...

I'd like to search the Yahoo Products, Yahoo Answers subcategory for this -- but I can't find a way to search Answers that restricts the results to just a subcategory.

Did this get removed? Are you insane? Or am I just not seeing what's right in front of me?

I could swear that earlier one could use the big "Search Answers" box at the top, then a box for Advanced Search would appear in the Right hand column of the results page. But I'm not seeing that now.

I sent an email to my Yahoo Mail account where I had written three HTML numeric character references into the subject field:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shalf/10272802443/in/...

Two of the three were correctly displayed as plain text, but the apostrophe got interpreted as an apostrophe:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shalf/10272690926/in/...

This is mysterious behavior, but also symptomatic of a very bad possibility that other HTML could be exploited in the message subject line.

Of note, Yahoo Mail Basic gets it right:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shalf/10273191846/in/...

And the View Full Headers mode of Basic gets it wrong in all three cases!!!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shalf/10273207675/in/...

Related issues: The view full headers feature appears to be missing/broken in Yahoo Mail fully featured. Also, I tried to report this via the Feedback Forum, but found that it would not allow me to post a new topic.

That simple sentence used to be the user's sole clue that this is an official contact point for getting help from Customer Care representatives. It seems to be missing from the banner now that I see a redesigned Answers (does everyone?).

Are Staff still here to help? I can see that Echo's been here lately, but she's not flying her "Staff" badge, nor any avatar at all (just a blank white space).

In groups which exclude attachments, or in other groups when a member posts a message in text/plain form, an URL in the message body normally (up until today) would be linkified when displayed in the group's Messages section.

That's a pretty basic function for a plain-text message reader, so I'm surprised it has broken in Yahoo Groups. Maybe this is an unintended consequence of another change. I hope it can be fixed and is not another devolution of Yahoo Groups.

Some Questions are turning up here (in the Yahoo! Groups sub-category of Answers) from people indicating that the formatting of their groups has changed. One person even sent me the "neo" URL to their changed group, but that URL timed out when I tried it.

In any case, I'd welcome the opportunity to test such a thing with my test group (sobfarleytest) or via one of my test accounts (shalstest_new), however the test selection works.

http://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-groups...

I sorted the board by "New ideas" and then I Shift+click'd (open in new window) on one idea to read and comment. I typed my comment then clicked the "Post comment" button. My comment then appeared below the Post comment box.

http://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451/suggestio...

I then closed that window and went back to the window still open on the list of ideas. The Idea said "0 comments", even after refreshing the page. Also after navigating away and returning. So I repeated the process, being careful to pay attention at each step. Same result.

But, if I click the "My feedback" tab I see the two comments I left on that idea.

So, either there's some lag in the posting (which I've never seen before tonight), or my comments are being moderated, or ... some kind of glitch?

In the Members list each member's ID is a link to their profile, of the form:

http://profiles.yahoo.com/shalfarley

(Note that the member's ID is in the URL, rather than the long hash string.)

These links used to work, for those members who linked their ID to their account, made their Profile visible, and marked some fields "Public". Now in all cases these links return:

"Not found

The page you were looking for doesn't exist. Go to your profile."

Likewise if you hover over the member's ID on an open message, and choose Profile from the drop-menu. You get the "Not found" error in all cases.

Is this a permanent change to Groups functionality (in which case, the IDs may as well be shown as plain text) or a temporary glitch due to some miscue between the Groups pages and the Profile pages?

That is, here:

http://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451-us-groups...

I accidentally clicked on "Flag as inappropriate" for one person's comment, and found that there is neither an ability for me to indicate why, nor an ability to reverse the Flag. I'm looking for guidance as to what should be Flagged.

I think it is obvious that offensive or obscene material should be flagged.

But what about something which is merely off-topic. Say there's a Suggestion about Yahoo Groups in the Groups Feedback board, and someone adds a non-sequitur comment about Yahoo Mail? What if that off-topic comment is a rant?

What about rants generally?

The community guidelines here in Answers encourage members to help enforce the guidelines by reporting Abuse, and what constitutes abuse is fairly broadly defined, starting with offensive material but going far beyond that. However, the Feedback Board is not Answers, so I don't assume that the same guidelines would apply (in fact, I think that would be inappropriate).

Now that the Help page has a link to the new Feedback board (the tiny "Suggestions" link in the page footer), I'm noticing a lot of deficiencies in that that product as compared to the Suggestions board of old (which had been the "Make a suggestion" link in the list of "Helpful Links").

I've been making my suggestions right there in that Feedback board, but I realize that they might be considered "meta" or "off-topic" as they are about the Feedback board, whereas the feedback there is supposed to be about Yahoo Groups.

If the Feedback board itself is a reasonable place, then I'd suggest having an additional category for feedback about the board itself.

New Yahoo! Groups feedback/suggestions:

http://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451

Old Yahoo! Groups suggestions:

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=groups