This morning, I tried to respond to a request for the best email discussion group provider with the address of Groups.io. It lead to much frustration. Every time I tried to go to a general page, I was reverted to my own list of groups. Even with a Google search the only page I could access was my own list of groups. I needed a link that would give them a description and list of features. This was a referral to a list of several hundred people each of whom probably has connections to at least three other Yahoo or Google groups.

Somehow I finally found the features page, but it took work.

Clicking on the logo on my list of groups would normally go to a home page with links to a home page. But the logo is also a link that returns me to my list of groups.

I think this is a major problem in the area of referring people who are likely to start new groups.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
TakomaDC@Groups.io
"Neighbors Talking to Neighbors”
Takoma Park DC and MD

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 06:09 AM, Peter Martinez wrote:

the type of mailserver with this bug could appear in other locations and I don't think it is safe to continue using a + in the email command.

Sounds like that's going to extremes. Anything bad can happen at any time. Doesn't mean you avoid doing everything because it's not safe.
 
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 01:11 PM, Dave Wade wrote:

I folks are violating RFC2821 then they are not treating them the same. However, I think only “.” is safe.

Exactly.  If they're not following the standard for one, what's to say they'll follow the standard for others?  Why do you think that "." is safe?  Since it's part of the same standard, it may not be safe on some services.  It's up to the email services to follow standards so problems like this don't occur.  It shouldn't require a web site (or other service) to "work around" the problem they've created.

Duane

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 08:09 AM, Peter Martinez wrote:

I don't think it is safe to continue using a + in the email command

If that's true, then it's not "safe" to use any punctuation in the local part.  Per RFC 2821, they should all be treated the same.

Duane

Lena:
Its true that we have only found one mailserver with this bug so far, but the type of mailserver with this bug could appear in other locations and I don't think it is safe to continue using a + in the email command.
regards
Peter

Lena:

This practice (of stripping the localpart after a +) may not be just happening at the single mailserver that we have found (synchronoss.net). .It may be a single TYPE of mailserver equipment or software from a single hardware or software supplier that could be fitted in many places. At the least I would ask groups.io to consider adding an alternative email command format (dot in place of +) so that groups that experience this problem can work around it.

regards
Peter

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 03:20 PM, Peter Martinez wrote:

This practice by some intermediate hosts in the internet

Not some hosts (plural), but single broken mailserver used by a part of BT users.

Scott, I would like the users of my group to be able to pay Groups.io directly. I don't want to accept donations because I suspect the donations would greatly surpass the premium cost for a year. If they could just keep "upping" the subscription we would have years of subscription paid up without me having to manage the finances of it.

Eric

In my group, a lot of users are willing to pay for the Premium upgrade.
So far, I paid for the year, several others have offered to participate
but I don't want to start collecting money from people and having to
manage an account for paying up the upgrade.

If users could donate directly towards the upgrade to Groups.io we would
probably have several years of upgrade paid up already.

As Gerald mentioned, this is available, but groups.io (understandably) charges a small fee to cover their credit card processing cost (and you have to have a stripe account).

When I recently moved a large group over from YG, I simply paid for the upgraded plan myself. After a bit, and having a couple of members mention it, I suggested that while not necessary, anyone who felt the need, could send me a donation via PayPal or mail a check. A little hassle but I did have a couple who did so. As long as the PayPal transfer is specified as sending to a friend, there is no charge.

Scott

Hi Gerald, that doesn't work the same way. With the current Donation feature I would have to have an account and manage money.

I don't want to manage money, I want Groups.io to get all the money!

Over on the Group Manager's Forum, it was suggested that I raise this problem here. Please read through the topic with the same name as this one on that group to see the full story, but in essence the + in the email commands is causing difficulty because some routes in the internet are stripping-out anything after a + in the local part of an email address. This results in a user who sends an email command finding it appears on the group broadcast, (and the command is not executed). The effect can be embarrassing in the +owner command, where a private message becomes public.

This practice by some intermediate hosts in the internet may well be "illegal" according to RFC 2821 but my intuition tells me it won't go away,so I would ask groups.io to consider changing the format of the email command. This can be done step-by-step, adding the new form alongside the existing + form then later deleting the + form when it becomes clear that there are no users still using it. I suggest something like <mygroups.command@groups.io> - the use of a dot in the local part of an email address is a well-established practice.

regards
Peter

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 09:04 AM, Eric di Domenico wrote:

In my group, a lot of users are willing to pay for the Premium upgrade. So far, I paid for the year, several others have offered to participate but I don't want to start collecting money from people and having to manage an account for paying up the upgrade.

If users could donate directly towards the upgrade to Groups.io we would probably have several years of upgrade paid up already.

Eric,

I think that feature may already exist. Take a look at this topic to see if it meets your needs:

https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/21108
 
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Gerald

In my group, a lot of users are willing to pay for the Premium upgrade. So far, I paid for the year, several others have offered to participate but I don't want to start collecting money from people and having to manage an account for paying up the upgrade.

If users could donate directly towards the upgrade to Groups.io we would probably have several years of upgrade paid up already.

Highly recommend open sourcing. The company I worked for open-sourced several products that I worked on. We saw no dips in revenue and it made the products more salable. These were enterprise service management products and utilities that no one in their right mind would consider compiling themselves and using without support. We invited customers to review the code before purchasing licenses. I suspect few actually did so, but the fact that they were able to bolstered their confidence in the products.
We got a few contributed bug fixes out of it, but not as many as I expected. Making use of contributed bug fixes was much harder than I anticipated.After reviewing and testing the fixes, most had to be rewritten to meet our coding standards and ended up costing about as much as we would have spent fixing them ourselves.
In retrospect, I would have liked to have invested in a management process for contributions and made it a routine part of our dev methodology. Unfortunately, our executive management was enlightened, but not that enlightened, and using contributions ended up being an ad hoc time suck. I.e. I spent a lot of weekends reviewing contributed code, rewriting and checking it into the build, and writing test cases for QA.
Best, Marv

A lot of the API is read only. If it was OSS I could submit a PR with a proposal.

for example, my group users are asking about managed tagging for photos. I looked at the API thinking I might be able to update titles with hashtags or something but it’s readonly.

Mark,

The way things are now is that the Title is used to generate the URL.
How would you propose to change it?

My recommendation: Pemalinks (like message numbers). Assigned when the page is created, and never reused.
https://beta.groups.io/g/main/topic/28775194

How would you propose to change it? Separating the title and URL when
editing a page? That might be a bit confusing.

Or that, but I'd separate them at page creation.
https://beta.groups.io/g/main/topic/28775194#19359

Shal

It matters if you change the name
When it makes the two things not the same. 
To the first URL
If you say "fare thee well,"
Then that is the end of the game.

(Best I could do on short notice!:)

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu