I am about to become the admin for a premium group for which most of the members are blind or visually impaired. While the groups.io web site is not exactly inaccessible, it doesn't entirely follow the accessibility guidelines set up by the W3C. What I mean is that while I haven't found anything a blind person cannot do on the groups.io web site, it often is way more difficult than it should be. Would the groups.io developers be interested in some suggestions as to how to make their site more accessible? The easiest and most important thing that could be done is to use more heading and paragraph tags. Here's a page  from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative web site that explains the appropriate use of headings.


https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/page-structure/headings/


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Jack Heim, john@...

In the drop down list of choices in the activity log, one of them is 'Prevented from Joining'.  I did find reference to it in the API, but can't quite seem to nail down what it really means.  An explanation would certainly be appreciated.

Thanks,
Duane

On Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 05:23 PM, Chris Jones wrote:

On Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 03:16 PM, ro-esp wrote:

Yesterday I wanted to send a private reply because the moderator had
closed the topic. So I clicked "reply to this message" and typed away. If
there was a notification about the topic being locked, I didn't notice.

It isn't clear about "how" you were attempting to reply; by email or using the
web UI?

on the website of course. If I had used my own e-mail I wouldn't have brought it up here.

if using the web interface when the topic is
locked there is no "reply" tab to click.

Well, there definitely was a "private" button...

groetjes/ĝis, Ronaldo

On Fri, Apr 1, 2022 at 04:03 AM, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:

I wonder if a configurable delivery delay would be helpful in general,

Isn't that was message moderation does?

Regards
Andy

Was the message with the file sent as an email message to your group?  Or was it sent from the group's web interface?

If it was sent by email, I doubt it could have been stopped even if the sender noticed it immediately.  If the sender uses Gmail, he/she can set up their own Gmail account to delay sending messages by up to 30 seconds.  That has saved me a few times.

If you had this option already, would you have known to turn it 'on', before this action happened?  I wonder if a mistake like this happens so rarely that it's not an issue until it happens, and then it's too late to enable it.  Unless the default setting is to enable the option, for every group.  In other words, not configurable.

On the other hand, I know people who tend to write and re-write messages multiple times until they get it just right, so they might like to see something like this.  But that would necessitate having a significant delay - say 5 minutes or so.  And that much delay would not work for me, and I suspect most others.

Andy

We just had a member accidentally send his full tax return to roughly 1,200 people in town, social security number, income and all. We have deleted it from the archives (he noticed right away), but it's obviously too late to prevent delivery to the non-digest members (most). I wonder if a configurable delivery delay would be helpful in general, e.g., if somebody reconsiders the kind/true/necessary qualities of a message after hitting send.

As others have said, locked topics normally do not display a Reply button.

Could someone else have locked the topic (or a hashtag expired or whatever) while you were in the editor? Or perhaps you reopened an old draft?

Regards,
Bruce

On Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 03:16 PM, ro-esp wrote:

Yesterday I wanted to send a private reply because the moderator had closed the topic. So I clicked "reply to this message" and typed away. If there was a notification about the topic being locked, I didn't notice.

It isn't clear about "how" you were attempting to reply; by email or using the web UI? I suspect the former; if using the web interface when the topic is locked there is no "reply" tab to click.

Chris

On Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 09:16 AM, ro-esp wrote:

Yesterday I wanted to send a private reply because the moderator had closed the topic. So I clicked "reply to this message" and typed away. If there was a notification about the topic being locked, I didn't notice.

When a topic is locked, the blue Reply option is replaced with a light gray Locked indicator, so if Reply was still there, it should have worked.  I did a private reply to a 'closed', but not locked topic and it was fine.

Duane

Hi there

Yesterday I wanted to send a private reply because the moderator had closed the topic. So I clicked "reply to this message" and typed away. If there was a notification about the topic being locked, I didn't notice.

Only when I tried to send the private message it didn't work. It just kept going back and forth between showing "send a copy to me" and not showing it.

I am not sure what the best improvement would be. Either allowing private replies, or notifying more clearly, or even just not allowing people to compose a reply at all when the topic is locked.

groetjes/ĝis, Ronaldo

All modern operating systems and programming language libraries internally use the tz database, with city-based naming that takes into account DST, as in America/New_York. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

This has the advantage that any updates to DST, as is being discussed in the US and has happened a fair amount internationally, gets reflected in the calendar entry, without having to worry about what offset was meant at the time.

In some cases, it's helpful to specify the common local name, such as "ET" (Eastern Time).

-- Henning

I submit that the residents of the "outlier" timezones without an unambiguous name know very well which established timezone is appropriate for their use, and when.

Residents of countries that do not adjust for DST already have to be aware of, and adjust for, our DST changes.  I assure you that the lucky residents of the Chatham Islands are well aware of the issue and do it in their heads, as do those in Vincennes, Il.  I've flown into Broken Hill, NSW, where those hearty Aussies have no problems with their UTC+09:30 timezone.

All of your concerns can be easily ameliorated by simply adding twenty-four "UTC-only" entries to the 'Timezone' drop-down list (or more if you want to specify every non-hourly UTC-offset in use on the planet).  It's hard to image that the current Groups.io code handles such outlier cases now.

I'm a member of several aviation groups; we pilots use UTC all the time - all of the clocks in my office (and my phone) display Zulu time.  When you regularly cross multiple timezones, or are coordinating meetings globally, the various local DST settings are a major PITA.

My solution is cleaner and less confusing, but the other solution is to list both DST values for every timezone (if any).  The downside is that the user making a calendar entry must know which entry applies, and we've just violated the "it just works" paradigm.

-Chip-

On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 10:37 AM, Chip Davis wrote:

The fundamental problem is one of over-specificity:  There is no reason for the Timezone drop-down list to mention anything about DST (or UTC offsets) in the first place.  If the Timezone drop-down entry had been simply:
   Eastern Time - New York
there would be no confusion, and the assumption would be that the software will make the necessary adjustment when time comes.  As it apparently does.

This suggestion is couched in the notion that every time zone has an unambiguous "name" of some kind and elimination the UTC designations won't lead to problems elsewhere.

Is that assumption valid? Not sure that it is, worldwide. Many countries don't recognize DST at all, and look at Chatam Time (UTC+13:45). Wow.

I'm not pleased about any of this, but it may very well be that the UTC information is a necessary evil. 

Regards,
Bruce

On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 10:10 AM, Duane wrote:

There is no duration option for Monthly Reminder.

Ok, then that's the problem. It's only a minor problem. More of a curiosity. :-)
Thanks for filling us in.
 
--
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 Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 11:50 AM, Janet_Catlady wrote:

Member Notice, of type Monthly Reminder. I can't see it any more because it expired and was deleted by the system. I don't know whether the system automatically puts a hashtag on these notices

Yes, a hashtag is added for those.  See https://groups.io/helpcenter/ownersmanual/1/managing-member-notices/monthly-reminder-notice

On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 11:44 AM, Andy wrote:

The option I see is for Topic Duration, with choices of One Day, One Week, One Month, Three Months, Six Months, One Year, and Forever.

There is no duration option for Monthly Reminder.

Duane

J, do you have any other of those Member Notices?  Maybe in your Gmail?  Or other ones that have not expired yet?

The automatically-sent Monthly Reminder might come with a hashtag already attached to it, just like file-upload and photo-upload messages do.  Whether the hashtag for the Monthly Reminder already had a "Topic Duration" set, I can't say, but an experiment should reveal that.  The hashtags for file- and photo-uploads do not, so I had to add them myself in my group.  But it would make sense that a Monthly Reminder hashtag might come with a One Month topic duration.

I thought you said that monthly notices were going out on a 30-day schedule rather than on the first of the month, so now I'm confused because you seem to contradict yourself.

If I understand it correctly, hashtag-initiated message expirations are not on a schedule.  The message (really topic) duration is set to one month.  Whether "one month" means "on the same date next month" or "30 days from now", I can't answer that.  But I think I can say with some confidence that groups.io does not have a procedure that runs at the end of every month that deletes all messages that have hashtags with "One Month" durations.

Andy

Andy,

The message (topic) in question was a Member Notice, of type Monthly Reminder. I can't see it any more because it expired and was deleted by the system. I don't know whether the system automatically puts a hashtag on these notices, and if so, which kind (seems like 30-day, from what I'm seeing, which would be incorrect if there's also a "monthly" option). It seems that maybe the message is correctly sent on the first of every month (I haven't noticed any anomalies there) but is incorrectly deleted/expires on tjhe 30-day schedule. As I said, I'm in the dark on this because I can no longer see it.

And yes, there's also the issue of inconsistent wording.

Good idea to check my email inbox, but most likely I deleted it. I'll do that later. Thanks.
 
--
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

J, I don't know if I have misunderstood what you're saying, but I do not see an option to make a Hashtag expiration correspond to calendar months.  The option I see is for Topic Duration, with choices of One Day, One Week, One Month, Three Months, Six Months, One Year, and Forever.  If that was the thing that deleted the message, then my guess is that the message was sent one month before today (or maybe yesterday).  The fact that it happens to be near the end of March probably was irrelevant.

But maybe you're talking about something else, and I misunderstood.

In my group's Activity log, the entry shows most of the topic name, but not the hashtag, which is unfortunate.  IMO, that ought to be fixed.

Do you not have your group's messages in your Gmail account?  When in doubt about something, I check the email I received.

I don't understand the question about "monthly reminder notices".  Do you want reminders send to you that a topic was deleted?  AFAIK, I don't receive any notices in my email about any message that was deleted, for any reason.

I would guess that the algorithm for monthly expirations, is either on the same day of the month that it was sent, or 30 days after the day it was sent.  But that's only a guess, because "months" are somewhat nebulous in our world.  :-)

Andy

My group had a monthly reminder type notice deleted this morning because of an "expired hashtag" (activity log entry). But there are two more days left in the month (today and tomorrow). It was hard to do a search on these in the activity log to see what dates they're generally deleted on, because the log entry says "expired hashtag" but there's no such search filter in the dropdown (another minor issue). I found "expired topic" and searched on that, and found that these are being deleted on varying dates - first of the month, 2nd of the month, sometimes the 30th of the month, etc. 

I can no longer find the topic itself (it having been deleted) to see what hashtag was on it. Is a duration hashtag automatically put on monthly reminder notices?

Second, could the log entry ("expired hashtag") and search criterion ("expired topic") be made to match? I don't think, unless I'm missing something, that a topic can expire without a duration hashtag having been put on it. So these seem to be one and the same.

And third, what is the algorithm for the deletion date in these cases? In my test group, I have some notice going out (supposedly) monthly and it's in fact going out every 30 days, as far as I can tell, with the result that the dates it goes out are getting lower and lower.
--
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

The 'Timezone' drop-down menu for a calendar event is causing a great deal of misunderstanding, and has an easy fix.

The Groups.io mavenry assure us that event times "just work" if one specifies the timezone appropriate to the time-of-day of the event.  Accommodation for Daylight Saving Time is handled by the Calendar software.

That's all well-and-good, except that the Timezone drop-down menu itself specifies a value for DST.  For example, DST is in effect today on the East Coast, so when I schedule an event for next week, the Timezone drop-down correctly offers:
    (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time - New York (EDT)
However, if I am scheduling a Christmas party on Dec. 20, 2022, which is obviously not in DST, the Timezone drop-down reads exactly the same.

The first thing most people do then, is to scroll around the list looking for the correct '(UTC-5:00) Eastern Time - New York (EST)' entry, which is not there.  The next thing they try is to compensate for that lack and specify a time earlier or later by one hour, and hope they got the conversion going in the proper direction.  The recommendation from the Groups.io mavenry is to just specify the time and the proper zone, and it will all come out right.  But that creates cognitive dissonance due to the obvious mismatch.

The fundamental problem is one of over-specificity:  There is no reason for the Timezone drop-down list to mention anything about DST (or UTC offsets) in the first place.  If the Timezone drop-down entry had been simply:
   Eastern Time - New York
there would be no confusion, and the assumption would be that the software will make the necessary adjustment when time comes.  As it apparently does.

This is an easy fix.