Steph,

Thanks for the help, since I have people who can only access their email
via the phone, trying to get them successfully in.

The invite should still work, but I'll admit I haven't tried it. I've got Gmail on an Android, plus Earthlink and Yahoo Mail I could access via the Chrome browser on the phone.

I could test one or more of those for you if you'd like, but the trouble is that they all already have Groups.io accounts connected to them; so that wouldn't actually test the experience of someone totally new to Groups.io. I'd have to create some new email accounts to do that. I'm game if you think it would help you. If most of your would-be members are on iPhone though, I don't have that to test.

-- Shal

Mark,

Nothing was on TV last night so I decided to write a Chrome app to
download Y! Group messages. I put it up at the yahoogroupedia, here:

[rubbing evil-mastermind hands together] Mua-ha-ha-ha!

It's based on the Chrome app to download member lists. It's not very
user friendly, and Yahoo may rate limit downloads, but it seems to work
for me. Feel free to tell others about it.

The experience with PG Offline, in classic groups, was that too much activity would get your account or IP address (I'm not sure which) blocked for a few hours; access to groups would give you an error page (999) while you were blocked. To cope with that PG Offline had a tunable parameter for slowing down the access.

I first tried it in my test group (680 messages) leaving the Start Num and End Num fields blank. Contrary to expectation that downloaded a single message (#1). Maybe it is good that it didn't try for all of them, as I thought it might.

I next tried setting them to 1 to 100, which worked, 101 to 200 worked, and so on. Until 601 to 700 - which kept on counting towards infinity. I let it go a few thousand then in order to stop it I changed the End Num to 680, clicked Download again and then it stopped and lit up the Save, which worked. Rather inconvenient having to manually adjust the numbers and get the final correct.

I didn't run into any rate limit problems that way, but I'll try again with bigger bites and see what happens.

If you'd rather not have discussion of this message exporter in beta, or would rather not hear about it at all, let me know. I understand that it is just a toy built on a lark, and not a supported program.

-- Shal

On 2/19/2015 12:21 PM, Jim Poston wrote:

As for the other side, have you tried to Add Members at YahooGroups
lately? As Shal pointed out, they've taken away that feature, for fear of
spammers taking advantage.

Especially when I tried to create a list for a group of
folks to talk about a monthly lunch. Biggest issue was
the list was a normal list of people - and responders
would forget "reply all" (including me), so I said I'd
set up a list.

You can't direct add, and a lot of the folks had Yahoo
addresses with "do not allow invites".

I gave up.

It's great that groups.io even offers the feature.

Yep - and I agree - there are some things I will pay
for. Like my own personal domain.

dg

Hi Mark and thank you.

I can see how to quote here now. Oddly the digest had the other copies of my message really jumbled up.

For freecycles, in basic they are a 'keep it green' where people locally offer things they do not need but are too good to toss out. They get posted to locals and if someone ants it, they respond back privately. You can also ask for stuff and people reply back privately if they have it. Main difference is it all has to be free (not the same as the selling groups like the BST here).

There's as with any larger block group some politics to it. This very issue is why many may want to at least dual home a group here as they check it out.

In the USA, the Freecycle.org owner tried to pretty much take over the yahoogroups owners (which Yahoo now ignores after they lost in court in the USA). It's a non-issue but a search will be confusing at first about that. Probably more pertinent is as a block when Neo came in and things were not there, we moved and shaped what we needed as a block fast and it got fixed. They just needed to know what we wanted. Most of that, seems to already *be* here.

The modtools tie in is we can easily traffic 1,000 messages a month and have to be able to moderate based on rules. ModTools allows those features (but is used for other types of groups as well). An example is we normally won't take a person off moderation until after they have posted some locally defined number of OFFER posts. ModTools counts them per user for us. Some need to control how many WANTED posts are made per month so ModTools counts those per user too. Other frills we need. Subject lines in order to make that work, have to start with a specific keyword and the Freecycle folks do all that training with ModTools allowing us to reject with a variety of crafted pre-responses we make up on our own.

I do not personally think it's worth your time to make your own version. Freecycle groups by and large are happy to pay a nominal 5$ a year for each group they use it with (I have 7, only 2 are freecycles and 1 café are on modtools). The more value for you would be in seeing if you can tie to ModTools (free I am sure) like TrashNothing has and allow it to interface a dual homed site so we can test.

If this is of interest, we can ask Ed to make default OFF until one of us clicks 'turn that on' and I'd be happy to be a test bed. That way all that happens on your end if fed traffic via a 3rd party tool by those who ask for it as they test it out. In fact, Ed could hard code it to specific groups for testing for a bit I am sure.

For right now, you have only one 'freecycle' and it's never going to function as it's not setup as other than that name. I have a test one that if we go live, has to be deleted because it's not really a local thing but more by name a 200 mile swatch of the country but that's ok for testing just what clicks I need to make to setup a real one. (grin). Biggest miss on my test Freecycle here was no way to send an automatied message to a pending member. If it were tied to ModTools, I can do that from there for the 3 groups on that.

Carol

Hi Duane,
The Full Name doesn't have to be your Full Name. It can be any name you prefer. I input Linda and left the User Name blank. Whatever groups I belong to are my business only.

Linda

After mulling it over, it's not quite as serious as I first thought (but still not needed.) The posts on the Recent Posts tab only show the first line or two (can't remember exactly) with a link to go to the post. If you're not a member of the group it was posted in, you can't see the rest. That could still be a problem on private archives though. Say someone asks for assistance on something. I might reply "I can help. Call me at 123-456-7890." Short enough that the phone number would be displayed, so dangerous. Same could happen with a home address or other "critical" information.

I tried removing the User Name as Linda suggested, but have since restored it. Seems to me that it works backwards. I would think it would show User Name on posts and anywhere else it would be public, with the Full Name only showing in the Profile, if supplied.

Duane

Hi Mark, I agree completely with Duane on this issue.

Duane, if you want to turn off your Profile, "User Name @"
should be blank : https://groups.io/editprofile?page=profile

Hope that helps,
Linda

If you forget and leave it off permanently, I won't complain. ;>) I really don't see any reason to show any posts. As Susan said, if someone wants to see what I've posted, they should go to the group(s). To be honest, I don't see any reason to have a public Profile at all, but don't see a way to disable it. A Profile for each group might be worth having if only members could see it. I don't think Top Hashtags, Top Posters, and Recent Photos should be on the group home page either, especially on a private group.

Duane

Ouch!!!! Please don't show posts in profiles!! That is what I hated about Big Tent. They had an inbox on your profile page. All I want is to put posts on a group page. They should go nowhere else.

If you want to see them you go to the group, just like yahoo. If you insist there must be an inbox on your profile then provide an option to turn it off and not have it. Having both an inbox In your profile and group page with messages would confuse our members so much our already stretched mod team would be overwhelmed with questions.

Susan B
Sent from my iPhone

I was trying to figure out something else, but stumbled across what I consider to be a major security issue. Although my groups have private archives, any posts I make are shown in my profile under Recent Posts whether the group is private or public. I'd just as soon not have any of my posts shown in my Profile. I don't know what it was intended to be used for, but it's bypassing the settings for the group.

Duane

On 20 Feb 2015 at 17:31, Duane wrote:

On the Settings page, click in the Description box, and use Ctrl+A
(Command+A on Apple) to select everything, then hit delete. Just
selecting it all may show you the extra stuff in there.

Thanks Duane, good suggestion but I had tried that to no avail. I also
tried to Ctrl-End to the end of the description and then cursor down.
Nothing shows up past the last characters and the cursor doesn't move..

However, there is a long scroll bar to the side, and stretching the edit box
shows a bunch of white space, but I just can't get to it.

I also tried Ctrl-A and deleting all, and then hand creating it again (vs
pasting). No joy.


--
Jim
Poston@vch-nv.us

<< Libertarians are Pro-Choice on everything! >>

On the Settings page, click in the Description box, and use Ctrl+A (Command+A on Apple) to select everything, then hit delete. Just selecting it all may show you the extra stuff in there.

Duane

On 20 Feb 2015 at 16:22, Mark Fletcher wrote:

Those are displayed for your group, you just have to scroll down a lot. There's a lot of blank space
on the page that's caused by the HTML in your group description. If you edit that out, it should
look better.

Good eye! Thanks!

But I can't find any blank lines or other HTML in the description that could
be causing all the space. I'm sure I got some crap in there when I copied
some HTML.

Is there a way I can reset the description to null? I don't see a way that I
can "edit code" or anything like that.

--
Jim
Poston@vch-nv.us

<< FOR SYSOP USE ONLY - Do not write below this line. >>