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locked Re: Group transfers

Shal Farley
 

Marlin,

As I see it now, what I did was a double space.

Just a double space between words, and the next character was a
quotation mark.
It is fairly common for rich-text systems, such as HTML, to turn successive spaces into non-breaking spaces. Such systems typically collapse multiple spaces into a single space, but the conversion to non-breaking spaces preserves the original count of spaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space

The unfortunate thing, in this case, is that non-breaking space isn't encoded in the base 7-bit ASCII set that is common to most character sets. The result is that it gets mis-interpreted when a system uses a different character set than the original.

The lesson for Groups.io is that messages posted by email have a specified character set, and that should be preserved in messages passed through. But as displayed in the archive, and as built into digests, careful handling is required. Perhaps the best approach is to convert the text to UTF-8 encoding, but that has its own issues.

My recommendation for the Archives would be to preserve the original message text unaltered, and capture the character set encoding as metadata. Then convert to UTF-8 on the fly for display. If a message gets edited update the metadata to reflect the character set used in the editing - presumably UTF-8. Of course that means the metadata must be versioned along with the text.

It really had me all kinds of upset, enough so that I shut the computer
down and walked away.
Nothing to be upset about, just computers being incompatible as standards change over time.

-- Shal
locked Re: Group transfers

Mark Fletcher
 

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:07 PM, Shal Farley <shal@...> wrote:

The odder thing is that the text of your recent two messages are invisible in the Archive, except in View Source. This may have something to do with leaving quoted material at the top of the message.

I noticed that as well. I was able to spend some time looking at it, but I don't think I'll be able to fix that bug until tomorrow.

Lots of great discussion about group transfers, and I really appreciate it. Please keep it coming. I'll add my 2 cents later today or tomorrow morning when I have some time.

Thanks!
Mark
 
locked Re: Wiki

Mark Fletcher
 

Hi Ellen,

You can change the title of any wiki page as well as delete any wiki page. You can always delete everything and you'll be back exactly at the beginning at any time.

Hope this helps.
Mark

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:10 AM, Ellen <esbaru@...> wrote:

Frances,

Thanks for the information. Do you know if it's possible to totally delete a Wiki or at least change the title of a wiki? My first concern is how careful I need to be in the naming of a wiki.
locked Re: Group transfers

Marlin47
 

Thanks for the explanation, Shal.

I have seen other discussions about this sort of thing, but, it had never happened to me that I know of.

It went from bad to worse, real quick, when I replied to my own reply and it did it again.

As I see it now, what I did was a double space.

Just a double space between words, and the next character was a quotation mark.

It really had me all kinds of upset, enough so that I shut the computer down and walked away.

But, I am ok now.

Maybe.

Marlin

On 1/3/2015 11:07 PM, Shal Farley wrote:
Marlin,

I don't know what all the characters are in that text I just sent, in
green, between the word�� "in"� and the word� "a".
It was probably a non-breaking space, originally.

You have Thunderbird set to encode your outbound messages in the Windows-1252 character set. One cure for that would be to set it to UTF-8, which will work better with most web sites and email systems (but work poorly with some legacy email systems, such as my Eudora Classic).

When seen by a system expecting UTF-8 that turned into the unicode Replacement Character - a white question mark inside a black diamond - a character used to replace an invalid UTF-8 sequence. That's what shows in the View Source view of your message in the Archives.

Then, that replacement character, seen in a system expecting Windows-1252 or one of the ISO character sets, would look like three symbols from the top of the character set.

The odder thing is that the text of your recent two messages are invisible in the Archive, except in View Source. This may have something to do with leaving quoted material at the top of the message.

-- Shal
locked preventing add -abuse

ro-esp
 

People, I don't think proving you have a an existing groups is enough. We need to have some way of "punishing" people who abuse the "add members" feature.

The easiest one I can think of right away is to have something in the "you've been added" message like:

groups.io does not want to spam. If you have been added against your will, please notify [email adress] instead of flagging the messages, so we can take the proper action against the abuse


Obviously, the person at that e-mail-adress should give the abusive listowner/moderator one or two warnings, and if they persist.. close the group

groetjes, Ronaldo

--
http://www.esperanto.net http://www.moneyasdebt.net
locked Files - search

Frances
 

Hi Mark,

The search function does not work in Files. Can’t retrieve names of files. 

This is the link I get from my searches:
and

But no content in the pages.

Using Safari 8.0.2

Frances
locked Re: Edits, deletions, moderation, oh my!

Shal Farley
 

Mark,

- If a user (or group) is moderated, approval will be needed by the
moderators before an edit or deletion happens.
I concur that a member should always have the ability to delete his/her own messages, even if edits or postings by that member are moderated.

- If a user (or group) is moderated, any calendar, files or wiki action
will also require approval (assuming the person has the authority to do
those actions in the first place). Basically, this changes the
definition of moderated from just posting messages, to any action in the
group.
That should probably be separate controls for the separate areas. I can well imagine a group wanting to have moderated messages and events, but not files or wiki pages. Or some other combination.

- And do you want the second phase? I'm happy to do it, but it'll be a
bunch of work.
I definitely want the ability to moderate the posting of events, as their reminders generate emails to the members. I don't think the wiki needs it, I'm less certain about Files.

And for the hard questions, about subjects and threads and hashtags.
Right now, you can't edit the subject of an individual message, you can
only edit the subject of the thread. It's not clear to me what should
happen if we let people edit individual message subjects. For example,
if you change the subject of a message in the middle of a thread, should
that split the thread into two different threads in the archives?
I'd look at this the other way around: the moderators/owners who want to keep their archives organized would want to have a method to move messages to a new or different topic. In that world-view the editing of the subject text for the topic is a secondary consideration.

The UI for this probably should take into account separately the Subject match and the header fields (In-Reply-To, References) of the message(s) in question, allowing the moderator to choose one or the other for the purposes of re-joining a message that was erroneously made a new topic due to the default "AND" processing. That probably being one of the most common use cases.

But it should also have an ability to make a message (and those that reply to it) a new topic, or to connect it (them) to an arbitrary topic.

And should a 'normal' user be allowed to do that? Should editing
subjects just be for moderators?
I think changing the topic structure should be a moderator-only capability. If members are allowed to edit the subject (and I don't see a reason that they shouldn't, subject to the same rules as editing the body), that edit should not affect the topic structure.

-- Shal
locked Re: Taglines

Shal Farley
 

Chris,

I think that it would be useful to be able to list your relation to a
topic next to your name via a tagline. Specifically, this is a group
specific text label that would be displayed next to your name within the
Groups.io interface.
Another way of looking at this is like the sig-lines familiar to email systems. In Gmail, for example, this would be the "Signature" that one can specify through the General Settings page. Likewise in Yahoo Mail it is on the Writing email settings page.

A member could configure this via the Subscription page for each group.

How would this be handled via email?
In messages generated via the Groups.io interface or posted by email it would be simple enough to append the sig-line to the message body. Then it would show in the Archive as well as in messages received by email. They could be distinguished using the Usenet standard "hyphen, hyphen, space" as a separating line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block

In the Archives they could perhaps be detected and displayed at the top, next to the posting member's name rather than at the bottom of the message, if they are not too long. A length restriction could be part of the detection method, leaving the signature at the bottom of the message if it is too long.

-- Shal
locked Re: Group transfers

Shal Farley
 

Marlin,

I don't know what all the characters are in that text I just sent, in
green, between the word�� "in"� and the word� "a".
It was probably a non-breaking space, originally.

You have Thunderbird set to encode your outbound messages in the Windows-1252 character set. One cure for that would be to set it to UTF-8, which will work better with most web sites and email systems (but work poorly with some legacy email systems, such as my Eudora Classic).

When seen by a system expecting UTF-8 that turned into the unicode Replacement Character - a white question mark inside a black diamond - a character used to replace an invalid UTF-8 sequence. That's what shows in the View Source view of your message in the Archives.

Then, that replacement character, seen in a system expecting Windows-1252 or one of the ISO character sets, would look like three symbols from the top of the character set.

The odder thing is that the text of your recent two messages are invisible in the Archive, except in View Source. This may have something to do with leaving quoted material at the top of the message.

-- Shal
locked Re: Group transfers

Shal Farley
 

Marlin,

In the process of proving to you that a person is an owner of an
existing group, how would you distinguish between whether the person is
actually the owner or just a moderator?
In Yahoo Groups there's very little distinction between an owner and a fully privileged moderator.

I would bet that there are countless numbers of groups where there are
moderators who would just love to steal the group from the owner.
Perhaps, but in such cases the owner would need to have limited those moderators' privileges just to retain control of the group. If the owner didn't give the moderator the privilege to change group settings then that moderator wouldn't be able to make the change to the description Mark proposed. And an owner that suspected that a moderator might want to steal the group wouldn't likely give the moderator that much privilege.

-- Shal
locked Re: Group transfers

Shal Farley
 

Marlin,

It used to be that you could export a membership list from Yahoogroups,
I have done it several times to compare a list to a list from a year ago
to see who had joined, who had left.

But, now when I try it, it does not seem to work.
If you're willing to use the Chrome browser you can try this application which is able to download the entire list (ignoring the limit of 1000 members imposed by Yahoo's user interface). It still seems to work for my groups.
http://yahoogroupedia.pbworks.com/Chrome+Application+to+Download+Members

Of course, you need to be a moderator in the group to get the email addresses.

-- Shal
locked Re: Group transfers

Shal Farley
 

Mark,

A couple quibbles:

- Email the member list and a link to the old group to a support account
I'll set up.
- I'll verify that the old group's description has been changed, and
directly add the members to the new group.
While this method verifies that you're in contact with an owner (or sufficiently privileged moderator) of a group, you have no verification that the addresses provided actually come from the membership list of that group. In that sense it is only marginally better than an open Add policy.

Also, that doesn't scale-up very well; I imagine you'll get pretty tired of this chore after a few score groups.

What do you think?
Perhaps have the list owner create a temporary Yahoo Account, make it a moderator or owner of the old group, and then provide you with the sign-in credentials of that account (probably better via a web page than email?). With those credentials you can have automation sign in to the group and download the members list directly.

There's a chrome application which is able to download the entire list (ignoring the limit of 1000 members imposed by Yahoo's user interface). It relies on an API call, which may be reasonably reliable.
http://yahoogroupedia.pbworks.com/Chrome+Application+to+Download+Members


-- Shal
locked Re: Group transfers

Frances
 

Hi

Exporting as CSV gave me a nice spreadsheet. I have a small group though. BTW, I use Mac products - Numbers.

Frances

On Jan 3 15, at 4:20 PM, Marlin47@... wrote:

On 1/3/2015 3:10 PM, Marlin47@... wrote:
On 1/3/2015 3:02 PM, Frances wrote:
Hi

When you say send the member list, would a TSV or CSV file work? I just tried and YahooGroups will allow this for up to 1000 names.


It used to be that when I downloaded the members list, all it sent back to me was the email addresses of the members, all in� a vertical column, with none of the other garbage.

Can you still download a list like that?




I don't know what all the characters are in that text I just sent, in green, between the word�� "in"� and the word� "a".

I looked at my "sent" message and it is just a single space between the words, nothing more, but, somehow it got interpreted into characters I do not even know how to send.








Also once you have moved the members, will they get an email automatically saying that they must create a password, etc.? Or do we need to ask them to create Groups.io accounts first?

Thanks.

Frances
locked Re: Group transfers

Marlin47
 

On 1/3/2015 3:10 PM, Marlin47@... wrote:
On 1/3/2015 3:02 PM, Frances wrote:
Hi

When you say send the member list, would a TSV or CSV file work? I just tried and YahooGroups will allow this for up to 1000 names.


It used to be that when I downloaded the members list, all it sent back to me was the email addresses of the members, all in� a vertical column, with none of the other garbage.

Can you still download a list like that?




I don't know what all the characters are in that text I just sent, in green, between the word�� "in"� and the word� "a".

I looked at my "sent" message and it is just a single space between the words, nothing more, but, somehow it got interpreted into characters I do not even know how to send.








Also once you have moved the members, will they get an email automatically saying that they must create a password, etc.? Or do we need to ask them to create Groups.io accounts first?

Thanks.

Frances
locked Re: Group transfers

Marlin47
 

On 1/3/2015 3:02 PM, Frances wrote:
Hi

When you say send the member list, would a TSV or CSV file work? I just tried and YahooGroups will allow this for up to 1000 names.


It used to be that when I downloaded the members list, all it sent back to me was the email addresses of the members, all in� a vertical column, with none of the other garbage.

Can you still download a list like that?







Also once you have moved the members, will they get an email automatically saying that they must create a password, etc.? Or do we need to ask them to create Groups.io accounts first?

Thanks.

Frances
locked Re: Group transfers

Frances
 

Hi

When you say send the member list, would a TSV or CSV file work? I just tried and YahooGroups will allow this for up to 1000 names. 

Also once you have moved the members, will they get an email automatically saying that they must create a password, etc.? Or do we need to ask them to create Groups.io accounts first?

Thanks.

Frances

On Jan 3 15, at 3:36 PM, J. Faulkner <jfaulkner44@...> wrote:

If you go to the Yahoo Group Moderators option in Management/Manage members, all of the moderators and owner appear there with a crown that is Blue for the owner, green for the Moderators.  It includes the email address for the owner and moderator which of course are different for each.
 
Judy F.
SW Florida - USA
 
From: Marlin47@... [mailto:Marlin47@...] 
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2015 2:16 PM
To: beta@groups.io
Subject: Re: [beta] Group transfers
 


I can think of another problem.

In the process of proving to you that a person is an owner of an existing group, how would you distinguish between whether the person is actually the owner or just a moderator?

If you would send a message to the     -owner    address expecting a reply from the owner proving that he received that message as the owner, I would point out to you that all the moderators also receive those messages.

I would bet that there are countless numbers of groups where there are moderators who would just love to steal the group from the owner.

That would be a slick way to do it.

I have a suggestion, but, it would mean more work for you, if you think this would be a problem.

Marlin





On 1/3/2015 12:51 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
Hi All, 
 
Happy 2015! Now that the holidays are over, I'll be able to get back to serious development work.
 
I've been trying to think of ways to make transfers of existing groups to Groups.io easier. My problem with having direct add of members generally available is that it tends to get abused and Groups.io gets labeled a spammer. But I want to make it easy to transfer groups over. 
 
If someone can prove to me that they own an existing group, I think that's enough of a bar to permit their members to be added directly. So, here's an idea:
 
- Create the new group at Groups.io
- Change the description of your existing group to include a link to the new group at Groups.io. Something like "This group has moved to https://groups.io/org/groupsio/GROUPNAME".
- Email the member list and a link to the old group to a support account I'll set up.
- I'll verify that the old group's description has been changed, and directly add the members to the new group.
 
What do you think?
 
Thanks,
Mark
 
locked Re: Group transfers

Judy F.
 

If you go to the Yahoo Group Moderators option in Management/Manage members, all of the moderators and owner appear there with a crown that is Blue for the owner, green for the Moderators.  It includes the email address for the owner and moderator which of course are different for each.

 

Judy F.

SW Florida - USA

 

From: Marlin47@... [mailto:Marlin47@...]
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2015 2:16 PM
To: beta@groups.io
Subject: Re: [beta] Group transfers

 



I can think of another problem.

In the process of proving to you that a person is an owner of an existing group, how would you distinguish between whether the person is actually the owner or just a moderator?

If you would send a message to the     -owner    address expecting a reply from the owner proving that he received that message as the owner, I would point out to you that all the moderators also receive those messages.

I would bet that there are countless numbers of groups where there are moderators who would just love to steal the group from the owner.

That would be a slick way to do it.

I have a suggestion, but, it would mean more work for you, if you think this would be a problem.

Marlin





On 1/3/2015 12:51 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

Hi All,

 

Happy 2015! Now that the holidays are over, I'll be able to get back to serious development work.

 

I've been trying to think of ways to make transfers of existing groups to Groups.io easier. My problem with having direct add of members generally available is that it tends to get abused and Groups.io gets labeled a spammer. But I want to make it easy to transfer groups over. 

 

If someone can prove to me that they own an existing group, I think that's enough of a bar to permit their members to be added directly. So, here's an idea:

 

- Create the new group at Groups.io

- Change the description of your existing group to include a link to the new group at Groups.io. Something like "This group has moved to https://groups.io/org/groupsio/GROUPNAME".

- Email the member list and a link to the old group to a support account I'll set up.

- I'll verify that the old group's description has been changed, and directly add the members to the new group.

 

What do you think?

 

Thanks,

Mark

 
locked Re: Wiki

Frances
 

Hi

I have edited the name of the homepage a few times. 
And other names too.

Frances

On Jan 3 15, at 2:10 PM, Ellen <esbaru@...> wrote:

Frances,

Thanks for the information. Do you know if it's possible to totally delete a Wiki or at least change the title of a wiki? My first concern is how careful I need to be in the naming of a wiki.
locked Re: Group transfers

Marlin47
 



I can think of another problem.

In the process of proving to you that a person is an owner of an existing group, how would you distinguish between whether the person is actually the owner or just a moderator?

If you would send a message to the     -owner    address expecting a reply from the owner proving that he received that message as the owner, I would point out to you that all the moderators also receive those messages.

I would bet that there are countless numbers of groups where there are moderators who would just love to steal the group from the owner.

That would be a slick way to do it.

I have a suggestion, but, it would mean more work for you, if you think this would be a problem.

Marlin





On 1/3/2015 12:51 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:
Hi All,

Happy 2015! Now that the holidays are over, I'll be able to get back to serious development work.

I've been trying to think of ways to make transfers of existing groups to Groups.io easier. My problem with having direct add of members generally available is that it tends to get abused and Groups.io gets labeled a spammer. But I want to make it easy to transfer groups over. 

If someone can prove to me that they own an existing group, I think that's enough of a bar to permit their members to be added directly. So, here's an idea:

- Create the new group at Groups.io
- Change the description of your existing group to include a link to the new group at Groups.io. Something like "This group has moved to https://groups.io/org/groupsio/GROUPNAME".
- Email the member list and a link to the old group to a support account I'll set up.
- I'll verify that the old group's description has been changed, and directly add the members to the new group.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Mark
locked Re: Wiki

Ellen
 

Frances,

Thanks for the information. Do you know if it's possible to totally delete a Wiki or at least change the title of a wiki? My first concern is how careful I need to be in the naming of a wiki.
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