On Jan 17 15, at 7:56 PM, Shal Farley <shal@roadrunner.com> wrote:

Mark,

My initial assumption was that people would interact with their groups
through email and through the 'Inbox' view on the Groups.io website,
instead of visiting individual group archives.

Through email is certainly true for me. Apart from moderator duties, I only go to the group's archives when I'm new to a group or to research messages that I may not have kept in an email folder.

When you subscribe to a group, all of the group messages instantly show
up in your Inbox. So, when viewing threads in Inbox view, depending on
your subscription, you'll have either 'Mute This Thread' or 'Follow This
Thread' at the top (you get the same option in the message footers when
emailed to you).

Interesting about the Inbox view. I ignored it largely out of inexperience with Groups.io, I see how that's a valuable way of keeping up with one's groups for those who don't rely on email. I would never have thought of it as a way to research the messages of a group I just joined though - I'd want to be looking at just their messages.

I think affordances for Muting or Following a thread likely should appear wherever one sees a thread - in the Inbox list itself (not just after opening the thread/message), as well as in the lists and opened messages of the group's pages.

And there are separate views for threads you've already muted or
followed, along with muted hashtags, so that you can 'undo' those
operations.

Excellent. It is possible that group- and member-specific versions of those lists ought to appear as tabs of each group's Archives page. I think that will help bring these features "out in the open" - make their utility more discoverable as well as making them easier to understand. Perhaps there labeled "Your Followed Threads" and etc. to make it clear that those are member-specific.

-- Shal