On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 03:53 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

This should be fixed now.

Partially.  The title is now fine in topics view, but if you click on the title, the resulting page still has the skewed text Andy mentioned.

Duane

On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 05:16 PM, Ken Kloeber wrote:

- "Reset"?  group profile -- does that resent to zero, or does it mean discard edits? (I'm afraid to click it!!)

Resetting a group profile removes any separate edits you have made so all values are taken from your higher level account profile.  Resetting a subgroup profile means values are taken from your higher level group profile.

Andy

Hi Mark,

in Topics view on the app subgroup message #258 from Bob Bellizzi does not display correctly. The full title of the topic is not displayed and if you display the message from the Topics view, the text is displayed under the last entry on the left side menu.  Single message and expanded views appear to be fine.

Regards
Andy

I know that payments and member data have been discussed before.

But w/ our Association memberships we need them BOTH to submit a laundry list of data and t=a membership fee.  All this has been done before archaically via snail mail.

Would it be possible for Premium groups to have a click button that brings up a customizable data form, then integrates with a payment option (Stripe, I suppose it would be, though we prefer PPal)?

I believe that it would REALLY help move fence-sitters toward Premium if they knew the cost could be defrayed via an EASILY option.  Donations is helpful (tho I haven't found how to implement it,) but not really helpful when we need the laundry list of member data submitted. 

It would be helpful if there was a warning buzzer when changing from one tab to another (e.g., editing the Group Profile then tabbing to Integrations,)
(Edits are lost.)

And
- More clear options - a membership edit is "Saved", but a group profile is "Updated."
- Unclear what the toggles are for on the Profile Photo options?  Nothing really changes -- all I see is a tiny thumbnail no matter the toggle that's applied.
- The "move" icon (4 arrows) @ the lower left of the Profile Picture?  It does nothing?
- "Reset"?  group profile -- does that resent to zero, or does it mean discard edits? (I'm afraid to click it!!)
 
Thank you for your efforts, I believe we'll enjoy the new (to us) Premium service.

[Mod note: Changed hashtag from #bug to #suggestion]

Mark

Yep, here NOW. 
But C'MON, the advanced toolbar was there yesterday only when I switched from "normalized" to non-normalized emails. 
We just upgraded to Premium, would that make a difference?  I also noticed a change in the presentation (expanding/contracting category menus. - nice.)

 

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 10:18 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

Unfortunately due to the way the Zoom API works, that won't work. We use oauth to get a token to use the API. To get that token requires the person to be logged into Zoom. Unfortunately that token has a really short expiration, something on the order of an hour, requiring re-verification by Zoom to get a new token. So we can't just store a bunch of tokens and let anyone use them, because they'd age out almost immediately.

Perhaps tangentially related and not specific to groups.io is that one of the challenges we've had over the years using zoom create calendar entries (irrespective of the calendar platform) is that it has basically proven to be a one-way pipe.  Zoom will happily create calendar entries, but it has not demonstrated good hygiene at clean-up when meeting is changed or cancelled via zoom,  leaving ghost calendar events scattered about.  
--
Kenny Paul, Technical Program Manager for ONAP
The Linux Foundation
Pacific Time Zone

Correction: the notice did not go through pending without being approved. (However, the photo itself did go through.)
The activity log entry is
"Integration sent message "Photo IMG_0275 2.JPG uploaded #photo-notice" requiring approval because it's a moderated integration message via email"
I'm not sure I understand the syntax of this. Maybe this is not a bug but a (weird) feature? There is such a thing as a "moderated integration message"?
--
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

A member on new-member moderation uploaded a photo. The photo was successfully uploaded without moderation (I'm not sure that should happen), but the notification message went into pending with sender as the photo name ("Photo IMG_0275 2.JPG uploaded #photo-notice"), and the notification went through anyway without approval. It seems like what gets moderated got mixed up. Instead of the photo itself being moderated because the member is, the notification was set to moderated (but went through anyway).
--
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

Further to my message https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25924 , Stan/jp's suggestion https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25922 of making the current Basic plan USD$5 a month and introducing a new Free plan along the lines of the more limited functionality the Basic plan will have after 24th August https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25893 and partly in response to Chris' concerns https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25928 about the difficulty of raising money within a group, here are some further thoughts.  At the end I discuss the idea of a Free tier and a $5/month or $55/year service similar to or the same as the currently free Basic service,

At least three ways of raising money to pay for the Groups.io service have now been mentioned.   I suggest two more.

One (A) is by a subset (or in principle perhaps all) of the members sending money to one person, such as the group owner, via PayPal (or in principle other means, but few would be easier than PayPal) until there is enough, such as for a year's service: WRB https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25943 

"Of more than a thousand members, I believe 21 or so contributed an average oof $20 for our original “premium year” before I cut off donations.  That’s not to say there would not have been more."

Similarly: RCardona https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25930 mentioned: Only about 10% of our membership made a donation, but sufficient funds were raised to fund the membership group for 2+ years.

A second (B) approach is for the group owner to pay for the service, as I do for one group, so far only a month old with about 10 members, only a few of whom write messages.   Dano https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25952 wrote:

"I have a few of my groups that I took Premium and I pay for those myself. Part of the reason is that I have a number of members who are barely on the internet (as I term it, they are in the extreme right hand lane of the information highway), but the experiences and information they bring to the group to share are priceless."

A third (C) approach was suggested by Paul Fox https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25931 .  He suggested a mechanism for group members to pay directly to Groups.io, since this would be easier than one group member collecting the monies, paying Groups.io and accounting for these transactions to the group or at least its owner.   I can see the attraction of this being a part of the Groups.io service in that the structures would already be in place for all groups.   It might even raise significant revenue in the absence of anyone in the group suggesting that such payments/donations be made.

I can imagine several problems with this as a payment (rather than donation, see below) which I think would make it overall a bad idea.  Firstly, there would need to be some complex arrangement for accounting to group owners regarding all such payments.  A person might be in several groups and would need to nominate which group the payment was for - thus making multiple payments for multiple groups.   Then there would be questions about refunds of payments accidentally made in error, with an extra zero or two.  Such payments would involve full credit card transactions, rather than something like PayPal which many people find easier and more secure.   Also, from the point of view of Groups.io as a business, there would be a more complex and much more voluminous accounting burden, with many more people making small payments.   There would be the need for invoices, manual work and records keeping for enquiries and and also entering into contractural obligations with many more people, all of whom would need to have agreed to a terms and conditions arrangement they almost certainly would not have read.  For instance, what if payments went a few years ahead of current fees and the group for some reason was closed?  Overall I think it is a much better idea for someone in the group to solicit, accept and account for these payments from members and then to present a single payment to Groups.io.

Here are two other ideas, prompted by Paul Fox's suggestion:

Plan D involves an easy-to-use Donation facility, linked to from the bottom of all emails for groups which are currently free of charge, where people can make a donation (something which doesn't require invoices or entering into a contract) directly to Groups.io to support this free tier of service, for all such groups.   This would presumably use the same credit-card payment system as is currently used.   A PayPal option would make this more attractive.  There could also be a link from the main Groups.io page.

Plan E is similar, but the link is to an Externally administered permanent fundraising page, at some well-respected fundraising web site, for the express purpose of funding Groups.io generous (but also a good introduction to the paid service tiers) free service tier.   There, the numerous community benefits of the free tier can be described in detail, there can be feedback from donors etc.  People would know that their money is going to a well-vetted cause and the website would presumably offer PayPal and any other convenient payment mechanisms.   Group owners who run free tier groups could write comments, or be quoted in the main page, with a brief description of how valuable the free service is to their group members.

Plan E would be some additional advantages.  People unconnected with Groups.io might see the page when perusing the fundraiser site, or see it mentioned on social media etc. as a worthy cause and make a donation.   This listing, especially to the extent that it was widely supported, would support the notion, which I think is entirely realistic, that Groups.io, although not a charity, goes to a great deal of effort to support community (and/or advocacy or however defined) groups by offering a free tier of service.  This enables the group members to communicate with each other in convenient, highly accessible and unique (no-one does this like Groups.io) manner - but that as a small business, it is asking for donation support in order to continue this effort on a long-term sustainable basis.

Chris wrote, in part:

"Be careful what you wish for..."

I wish for Mark to find it satisfying and profitable to run Groups.io for as long as he likes - and for that to be as long a time as possible.  No other person has both such a good vision of social and commercial communication being supported by a combined email and web-forum AND has made it happen for so many groups of people.   He did this in the mid-1990s and is still working on this enormously pro-social project.

(Today I discovered that the archives automatically hide trailing quoted messages.  This greatly improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the of the archives, without me having to trim them myself or keep pestering people to do so when they reply.)

Despite whatever financial difficulties any group faces, no-one owes them a free service.   Mark has made a commitment not to change arrangements for existing groups, which is a fine thing, but in the long term, I think circumstances may change and that no business should be expected to support anyone but their paying customers, unless perhaps with the help of government funding.

I think jacking up the currently free Basic service to USD$5 a month and adding a Free service underneath it would be a good idea.   This would have all the Basic services of email, searchable web archives, moderation, web posting of new message and email attachment facilities, with the 1GB attachment storage limit.  (I guess the archives can be edited to delete those no longer wanted as the limit is being reached, to allow new message attachments to be stored.) 

This is quite different from Mark's updates https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25893 and https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/25936 which involve what I described as Free being the new Basic, and there being no Basic service (all this is for new groups - existing groups are unaffected), except as a subset of the level of service provided by Premium.  In the changes as planned, I think there would be a very big gap in functionality between the new (minimal and free) Basic and Premium.  I think the zero to USD$20/month (USD$220/year) gap is likely to be a significant hurdle when someone is considering establishing a group.  

It is one thing for a group owner with 1000 members and years of experience to contemplate raising the USD$220 a year.  It is more daunting for someone just starting out, perhaps never having run a group before, and being uncertain of how much money they or their potential members might want to pay per year if the group is relatively small.  They may want the extra features, such as photos, files etc. in part to make the group attractive to members, but not feel confident enough about the success of the group, and so of their own commitment to the project, to pay $30 a month.  

  Robin

I believe the failures in the "policy evaluated" section are what MxToolbox calls alignment failures. Which kinda makes sense, if a third party is signing email with a spoofed certificate but not actually sending from that certificate's domain. (If that's what misalignment means.) Here is their report on that XML:

@Mark Berry, it just occurred to me that perhaps the "pass" result in the "auth_results, dkim" section is simply confirming that a valid DKIM record was found for the "groups.io" domain.

Sorry, I only thought of this after I realized the "policy evaluated" section shows "fail" in the "dkim" section and appears to be (rightly) determining that the DKIM is invalid. I'm trying to find the relevant docs that may explain this.

What I don't understand is why the "source ip" does not show up on any block list yet. :(
--
Jim

I posted this in the Group Managers forum and a members suggested I post it here.

I'm working on setting up DMARC on my domain, obfuscated here as mydomain.com.

For a few days after I started posting in the Group Managers forum, I was getting reports of thousands of would-be failures for email sent from Moldava. I found a raw report with the Moldavan IP address. I don't quite understand the <auth_results> section:  it looks like DKIM is passing using the groups.io signature, but the foreign IP (bleza(dot)skilldivinet(dot)net) is passing on SPF. Are they somehow spoofing the groups.io DKIM signature? Here is the report, with the questionable section in bold:

<?xml version="1.0"?>    
<feedback>    
  <report_metadata>    
    <org_name>Yahoo! Inc.</org_name>    
    <email>postmaster(at)dmarc.yahoo.com</email>    
    <report_id>1596936350.redacted</report_id>    
    <date_range>    
      <begin>1596844800</begin>    
      <end>1596931199</end>    
    </date_range>    
  </report_metadata>    
  <policy_published>    
    <domain>mydomain.com</domain>    
    <adkim>r</adkim>    
    <aspf>r</aspf>    
    <p>none</p>    
    <pct>100</pct>    
  </policy_published>    
  <record>    
    <row>    
      <source_ip>194.50.188.140</source_ip>    
      <count>1896</count>    
      <policy_evaluated>    
        <disposition>none</disposition>    
        <dkim>fail</dkim>    
        <spf>fail</spf>    
      </policy_evaluated>    
    </row>    
    <identifiers>    
      <header_from>mydomain.com</header_from>    
    </identifiers>    
    <auth_results>    
      <dkim>    
        <domain>groups.io</domain>    
        <result>pass</result>    
      </dkim>    
      <spf>    
        <domain>bleza.skilldivine.net</domain>    
        <result>pass</result>    
      </spf>    
    </auth_results>    
  </record>    
</feedback>    
 
The only groups.io DKIM TXT record I know of is 20140610._domainkey.groups.io. If that is a date stamp, perhaps it's time to rotate the key?

Regards,

Mark Berry

When adding text to the Group Description block, we have the Full Monty text edit/format toolbar.  Except if emails are set to "normalized" text.
To create rich text in that block  one needs to turn OFF normalization, make the edits, turn on normalization, check the result (and go thru the routine to fix something amiss.)  Not earth ending, but clunky.

Can rich text be the norm for that field, or must it be tied to the format of the emails?

ALSO, is it possible to add rich text to the custom email footer, or must that be Pain Jane? 
Turning off "normalization" (as done above) had no effect on that block (no toolbar magically appeared.)

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 06:11 PM, RCardona wrote:

Only about 10% of our membership made a donation, but sufficient funds were raised to fund the membership group for 2+ years.

And therein lies the problem. On your own admission you have 90% freeloaders.

Chris

I think using the term "Freeloaders" is inappropriate here. Chris, you apparently have a group of younger, affluent, working members. There are a number of groups that have a certain fraction of retired members. They may be on fixed incomes or not. From the description, I would suggest you know nothing about the makeup or purpose of RC's group, and you are making assumptions that show your lack of understanding.

I have a few of my groups that I took Premium and I pay for those myself. Part of the reason is that I have a number of members who are barely on the internet (as I term it, they are in the extreme right hand lane of the information highway), but the experiences and information they bring to the group to share are priceless. Members bring to the table what they have. Some have vast experience to share. Some come seeking that knowledge and have the ability to help support that exchange. And some come seeing information and guidance.

Implying that any member is a "freeloader" without knowing the specific situation is, in my mind, out of line, especially given the state of public decency, or lack thereof, in public discourse today. Such comments will get you pigeonholed in some people's minds and can harm your credibility in the long run.

Dano

On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 05:59 AM, JediPirx wrote:

Just a thought, but, what about creating a "Free" plan that
is mailing list and possibly Wiki only, and keeping "Basic"
as is but adding a nominal monthly charge ($5/month ?). This
avoids legacy plan tracking.

What is "legacy plan tracking"?

Those on the Basic plan who only need mailing list can
downgrade to Free plan if they wish.

Those who only need a mailing-list can use yahoo, mailman, riseup and many others

People come to groups.io for the digests, the message-archive, the polls, the thumbs-up - and maybe to avoid google...

About how many groups in total are we talking actually?

And am I the only one worrying about the fact that Mark F is doing everything by himself?


groetjes/ĝis, Ronaldo