Particularly confusing is this juxtaposition, because of the possible conflation of "message" and "email":

 Special Notices Only You will only receive special notices from the moderators.

No Email You will receive no emails.
As discussed before, it would be better for Special Notices Only to be grouped with the "message selection" section (currently on the Advanced Preferences page), because that's what it is: a message-selection filter, not a delivery method. But what confounds the confusion is the word "email" just below that. Because Special Notices only really is a matter of message selection rather than delivery, the brain then parses "No Email" below that to "No Messages." The result, or one of them, is that you think if you later set yourself to Following Only, the "No Email" (which your brain subconsciously turned into "No Messages") turns into "only the messages I'm following." And of course, that's not what happens. You still get no messages except special notices.

So I think it is particularly important to distinguish, in all of this, between "message" and email." One bit of language that may help is to substitute "Web Only" for "No Email."

--
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

>>> I fear that no matter what, if anything, is done, there will still be people that don't read the information presented, same as with guidelines or welcome messages.

You're right Duane, and that fact is the reason I personally prefer to make the option/setting title less clinical and more explanatory, if there is something of high importance in the explanation/help text which isn't really being conveyed by the title; it's even more important IMO if that option/setting is presented to the whole audience matrix.  So you just caused me a bit of additional work on this, lol jk, good hint-idea actually and I will create an alternative version of our proposal with more english option/setting titles, leaving the help text as is.

Or possibly also a 3rd version as well where the titles stay as now more-or-less (current proposal), but with the title integrated with the help text as a whole paragraph, with the title bolded.  It may encourage reading the help text because it's now flows together naturally with the title in reading the sentence.

--

Cheers,
Christos

On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 11:14 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

premium groups under the per-member pricing can have up to 500 members for $20/month (instead of 400), and additional members above that are $0.04/month.

Will the annual also change?  $0.44/yr?

Thanks,
Duane

Hi All,

The new per-member pricing is now live for newly created/upgraded groups, as discussed here. There is one change to note: premium groups under the per-member pricing can have up to 500 members for $20/month (instead of 400), and additional members above that are $0.04/month.

All premium groups now have 30GB storage.

Also, a related change is that the member count on group home pages now does not include non-confirmed members.

At this time, I have not implemented a free/paid user scheme, as first proposed by Samuel. I still think it may be a good idea, but as discussed, I think it was too complex. I may revisit it at some point.

Finally, I appreciate all the discussion over these changes.

Thanks,
Mark

And again, it's a problem because No Email, while technically an email delivery method, comes across as a message selection/filter (it reads like "No Messages"). So when you choose Following Only it seems to override No Email. But we've been over that. 
--
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

> Oh well, I will ... see if there is some kind of iPad setting that will let me override the mobile iOS display and instead see the desktop OS version displayed. It was nice to have the choice of which display version I wanted but as in all things time marches on...
Sandi Dickenson

Not on an iPh but sometimes have a similar(?) issue of late.

Sizing IO to read a mag is someyimes a.wrong size for inserted or attached info, text ir chart/etc. Must keep a.closer.eye on tbis to make a better report.

I do find 99% of IO tonbe such a tiny font that reordering my settings to allow landscape mode, (which I turn on only for rare videos,) still results in a small font that I can barely stretch enough to read. No font setting changed have altered anything, so far. Makes me feel like I've lost all ability to function is this common ph-venue.

BillSF9c

On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 08:36 AM, Duane wrote:

Maybe we just comprehend differently, but that bit of text is a full explanation to me. 

It's a full explanation if you (a) fully understand what "email delivery setting" means and (b) didn't set your email delivery setting several months ago. Even if you understand those two, it feels psychologically - even to me, even a few days ago! - that changing to Following Only is going to increase your deliveries from No Email to the "email from the topics I'm following." It feels psychologicially (and even intellectually) like an increase. "I'm going to increase from No Email to getting the ones I'm following." It (the UI) is really in radical need of a fix and I hope this doesn't get swept under the rug.

I fear that no matter what, if anything, is done, there will still be people that don't read the information presented, same as with guidelines or welcome messages.

That can't happen if the system disallows the bad combinations. Your idea to completely disable adv prefs if no email or special notices only is set would be part of the equation. The other part would be doing the converse. Just make it so they can't exist simultaneously, and make the text much clearer so that it explains to the user that's what will happen when they change either side.

I like Christos's original plan as set forth here. Yours is good too, and there are undoubtedly others. I'm not intending to make any particular suggestions with my message this morning beyond what has already been suggested. I am just making the point that this is in great need of a fix.

--
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 Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 09:21 AM, J_Catlady wrote:

That little bit of text "according to your email delivery setting" below the Following Only option does absolutely nothing to warn people about this trap.

Maybe we just comprehend differently, but that bit of text is a full explanation to me.  Another idea would be to disable all of the Advanced Preferences everywhere if No Email or Special Notices Only is selected for that subscription.  Also adding "regardless of any advanced setting" on the No Email and Special Notices Only descriptions might help those that don't fully understand it.  I fear that no matter what, if anything, is done, there will still be people that don't read the information presented, same as with guidelines or welcome messages.

Duane

OMG! Listen to this. This is a case in point and the victim was me, myself and I. 

I joined a group several months ago, setting myself up to No Email. A few days ago I got interested in a topic there and went in and "changed" myself (or so I thought) to  Following Only and clicked on Follow This Topic for that topic. Nobody in their right mind - including me, who originally pointed out this issue - is going to think at that point that they would have to undo their No Email setting in order to receive messages from a topic they had just clicked on to follow. You think - and I say this AS THE VICTIM, and as a sophisticated user, and the person who originally brought up the problem! - you think you are *increasing* the emails you receive by choosing to follow some.

So believe it or not, several days later I  couldn't understand why I was not receiving the messages from the topic I clicked to follow.  EVEN AFTER this long, drawn-out conversation, in which I myself brought up the issue on behalf of my group members, I didn't truly understand the psychology of the situation was until I experienced it. I kept checking for days, trying to match my emails with the messages onsite.

Then it dawned on me: I had to go into the OTHER page and remove my No Email setting and change myself to Individual Messages. This is where I would have used the "hit self over the head" option (Chritos's little hammer:-).

That little bit of text "according to your email delivery setting" below the Following Only option does absolutely nothing to warn people about this trap. If I fell into it, even after this discussion, others will, too. You think, when you select Following Only, that you are *changing* from No Email. You're not.
--
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 Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 08:26 AM, Andy Wedge wrote:

Rather than scroll down and do Next Page I sometimes tap/click on the Name column header to change the sort order.

Thanks Andy for that tip. I do have 100 entries per page already which is likely why the scrolling takes so long to get to the bottom and find the next page arrow. The reverse order you described works great! Once we spill over to that 3rd page it won't capture the one in the middle page, but for now it does what I need. 

Up until this year I have been able to enjoy the desktop website experience on my iPad and it's just frustrating to be handicapped by code that forces me into mobile website displays that make perfect sense when on a 5 inch device. My iPad Pro is the same screen size as my older MacBook Air but my iPad is easier for me to use and has a retina display. I was very content on the desktop view version before the rollout of the mobile-iOS display version and adaping to it has been personally difficult. 

Oh well, I will take the issue to a Mac centric group to see if there is some kind of iPad setting that will let me override the mobile iOS display and instead see the desktop OS version displayed. It was nice to have the choice of which display version I wanted but as in all things time marches on...

--
Sandi Dickenson

You're right: the date sorting doesn't sort by date (see attachment).

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 05:51 PM, Christos G. Psarras wrote:

As to why do all this?  Spamming maybe?  Or could some enterprising mal-admin use this spoofing trick in some mal-capacity? I don't know but common-sense has proven time and time again that you never know what people will come up with.

Okay, so you're trying to find a way to prevent abuse.  Then perhaps you should post a #suggestion that a user can enable an option in his settings called e.g. "Convert clashing subject line tags" which would cause Groups.io to compare any bracketed text of incoming messages' subject lines against the subject line tags of the groups that that member is currently a member of, and if there is a match, it changes the tag from e.g. [beta] to {beta}.  It must be possible for users to disable this check (in case they get too many false positives).  I suspect adding such a feature would be considered overkill, though.

Samuel

On Sat, Feb 6, 2021 at 11:46 PM, Malcolm Austen wrote:

The 'Sent invitations' list sorts fine when clicking on the Email or Status headers but it doesn't sort in any obvious way when I click on the Invited header. ...?

I assume you mean Admin > Invitations > "Sent invitations" button.

I don't have a non-grandfathered free group to test this in, but on my screens, the "Invited" column contains dates.  Clicking the header sorts the list by invitation date.  Doesn't it do that for you?

While I'm here although this is only a #suggestion or #request ... could we have a search option on the 'Sent invitations' display please?

Use Admin > Activity > "All activity" button > "Actions" dropdown list > Invited member.  Then include your search term to the left of it, and click the Search button to the right.  Does this work for you?

Samuel

The group's Subject Tag is in no way restricted to square brackets. You can use curly braces or angle brackets or no delimiter at all. Change it to whatever works for you.

Regards,
Bruce

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 10:51 AM, Christos G. Psarras wrote:

As to why do all this?  Spamming maybe?  Or could some enterprising mal-admin use this spoofing trick in some mal-capacity? I don't know but common-sense has proven time and time again that you never know what people will come up with.

As I see it, it wouldn't be just a problem on the group, it could also be done without actually sending anything to a group by using personal email.  It might not be as slick, but a person would still receive the same spoof.  If/when anything 'weird' like that comes in, I check it well before taking any action.  Unfortunately, there are a LOT of people that don't, they take things at face value.

Duane

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 07:32 AM, Malcolm Austen wrote:

I see no bug here.

Agreed. Even if changes were made that prevented the use of these brackets in Groups.io, there's nothing to stop emails sent from outside Groups.io using them. Everyone needs to vet every incoming email, regardless of the apparent source. This seems to be a solution looking for a problem.

Andy

>>> I see no bug here. In my experience, it's normal list practice to simply prefix the subject if the list prefix text is not already present. Banning other square brackets would, for example, prevent someone asking in a techie groups about the use of [a-z] in a regular expression
>>> This seems much more like a group rule that some groups may choose to enforce rather than a technological problem in need of solution.
>>> [ and ] are perfectly valid characters in a subject line and can be used for all sorts of reasons.

It's my fault for not making it more clear in the OP; two of the "all sorts of reasons" this allows are not just silly mischief but more importantly, email tricking/spoofing.

If you noticed in the second silly example I provided above, where I can include other group's tags verbatim in my subject line, we are facilitating an admin, for fun/mischief or more sinister reasons, to make emails from their group "pretend" to be from another group: use no group tag, carefully set the message subject where it looks exactly the same as posted on another group, except one letter difference, easily missed if not paying attention. 

For example, just for the fun of it, I did that to my test group: renamed it to betta, main, and no group tag, and copied this topic's subject.  I end up with this emailed message in the inbox, which is buried/camouflaged along with the rest of the real topic, and to the careless, it looks like the real thing, only one letter difference in the address:



Invitations and DirectAdds from this betta group look like the same as the real beta ones to the careless/glance-overs, only one letter difference. 

I think I can more or less safely bet that:

- If I was to directadd you to betta, you'd probably do a "whaaat? I'm already a member, did Mark do something??" double-take initially, until you either spot the tt, or you click on the email links and go to betta's home page to see what the heck, which, if I wanted it to look like beta's, I could have, to a very close point at least.  Either way, you'd eventually figure it out and maybe come here to GMF or beta and report it.

- If I had taken the above betta spoofed message and instead of the "footers point to..." text, I had added a direct quote from one of the participants in this topic, and asked them to explain further or whatever which would necessitate their reply, and I also added the betta address in ReplyTo, then sent it to betta but also BCC'ed one or all of you participants, you'd receive it as the above seemingly-looking legit message, and because it's easy to miss, and you're also have the implicit bias of being dead-set against doing anything about this (fine, not a bug but still an) issue, there is a good chance you'd have replied back missing the trick, thinking your reply went to beta, only it didn't, it went to betta.

As to why do all this?  Spamming maybe?  Or could some enterprising mal-admin use this spoofing trick in some mal-capacity? I don't know but common-sense has proven time and time again that you never know what people will come up with. 

So if we think there's no other use than just having fun with this, and we're fine with how it currently works, then end of story I guess.

Although I'm not really though happy I had to explicitly show how to set it up (although it's not hard to figure out) ... maybe Mark should delete this topic and I can resubmit it worded less explicitly and as a #misc this time for further discussion, unless if everyone thinks it is end of story.

Cheers,
[Christos]