On 18/12/2020 16:30, Larry Finch wrote:

I am site manager for a Listserv (L-Soft) mailing list server. One of its
features is Probe, which periodically sends a message to each registered
address asking them to respond positively if they wish to remain on the
list. If the email bounces or they don’t respond they are removed from the
list. This catches addresses that do not receive list email as well as
those no longer interested.

In my experience, GMail is extremely good about identifying those probes, and labelling them as spam. Whilst I should look at my spam box at least once a week, i don't. (Roughly 30% of the email GMail marks as spam, is legitimate email from a mailing list I subscribe to.)

jonathon

On 18/12/2020 15:29, J_Catlady wrote:

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 07:18 AM, Drew wrote:

as group owners we are like Chichikov in Gogol's "Dead Souls"-- continuing
to pay a tax on the inhabitants of our estates even though they may have
"moved on" since the last census was taken years ago.

That makes me wonder (going off-topic here) if there could or should be a feature wherein we can ask members to actively confirm that they want to stay in the group.

Back in the late 90s, the recommendation for migrating from one list platform to another, was to send an email with the new subscription address for the list, to list-members, advising them that they had to go through the subscription process, and list management would not help them subscribe. A 30% loss of subscribers was about par.

Based on that advice, some list-owners sent a notice to the list every 6 to 9 months, announcing that everybody would be removed from the list, and would have to resubscribe, if they wished to continue receiving messages. More than once I subscribed to such a list, only to removed the following week, and having to resubscribe to it. Typically, such purges resulted in a loss of between 20% and 50% of the subscriber base.

In the early noughts, more than one book on mailing list management suggested a rule of unsubscribing an individual, if they had not made a post within the last 91 days. List-owners that implemented that rule discovered subscriber numbers took a nosedive, and stayed down.

List-owners for free groups may have to resort to tactics similar to those described, to stay under the maximum member mark.

On the upside, Mark did give a month's notice, for list-owners to skate in under a grandfather clause.

jonathon

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 02:03 PM, J_Catlady wrote:

Right. And some of us have been around long enough to know that Mark keeps his word.

Agreed.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 10:55 AM, Peter Cook wrote:

I believe this covers you. Per Mark's original post:

• These changes only apply to groups upgraded after January 18th, 2021 at 9am Pacific Time; existing premium and enterprise groups will keep their legacy pricing. If a premium group opts to downgrade and then upgrades at some point in the future, they will be subject to the new pricing changes.

Right. And some of us have been around long enough to know that Mark keeps his word.
 
--
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 Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 01:52 PM, John Wirtz SF wrote:

So, Id like to know exactly what my terms will be from next year.  Currently pay a fixed monthly fee.  Is that going to rise, my group is about twelve months old now.

 

I believe this covers you. Per Mark's original post:

• These changes only apply to groups upgraded after January 18th, 2021 at 9am Pacific Time; existing premium and enterprise groups will keep their legacy pricing. If a premium group opts to downgrade and then upgrades at some point in the future, they will be subject to the new pricing changes.

Back in 2017 I moved several lists from YG to groups.io.  As a result I became Owner or Co-Owner of several of them.  All of them were Basic(free) lists. One has upgraded to Premium because of

the perceived need for greater image storage.

My biggest list is nearing 2000 members, image storage is about  70%  

It will be another 3-4 years before we reach the 1GB limit, so there is No Immediate Need to Upgrade.

However there is an Immediate Threat to Upgrade to Premium.  After Jan 18th an upgrade to Premium will cost

$1100 a year, a massive jump from Free.

The proposed pricing structure indicates that the preference is for lists over 1000 members to Upgrade to Enterprise

which for my 2000 member list would cost $4400 annually if upgraded after Jan 18th.

Most of the image storage is in the files section, only a small percentage is attachments to messages.  In ten years image storage may reach 2Gb if not managed.

Most members search the archives, only a small percentage post new information.  Searchable archives are the main reason we moved to groups.io

My dilemma is future per member pricing for currently grandfathered lists. I don't expect grandfathered lists like mine to avoid per member pricing forever, perhaps only in the near future.

Mark is leaving a lot of money on the table each year existing lists are exempt from per member pricing.  If this is a first step and in the future, for example, existing Basic (Free) lists over 200 members would be charged

$0.50 per year per member; a decision to upgrade now would be easier to justify.

Your first two sentences were also true back when Groups.io offered fully featured “free groups”.  

Having the ability to upload banned domains from a csv file would be a beneficial feature for those of us managing multiple parent groups. This would be especially valuable during the creation of a new parent group, which we do a lot of at the LF. 

If the capability does already happen to exist, if the https://groups.io/helpcenter/ownersmanual/1/banning-domains-from-the-group page could be updated with the how-to, that would be spiffy. :-)  

As always, thanks for the consideration.
--
Kenny Paul, Technical Program Manager for ONAP and LFN
The Linux Foundation
Pacific Time Zone

Hi Mark,

I consider this a bug, but someone else on GMF didn't.  Regardless, it's inconsistent:

- If there's a pending message, as owner, I get an email reminder near the end of the 14-day period that the request is is about to expire.
- If there's a pending membership, however, I don't get such a reminder, and the request expires without warning.
To me, a pending membership is more serious than a pending message.

Can we get reminders for pending membership requests as well?  This was something that Yahoo had.

Thanks,
Cal

When I select infinite scroll in display preferences and look at the Photo Album page, it only displays the top 20 albums with no scrolling available. 
The navigation buttons are no longer available (as expected if you could scroll) so you can only see these albums with no indication that others are available. The same thing happens inside an album, you can only see the first 20 photos.

I've found this on a win10 PC (edge), and android tablet (Chrome), and it was reported by one of our members using safari on an ipad, 

It seems to work as expected for messages, and members.

Chris

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 08:30 AM, Larry Finch wrote:

If the email bounces or they don’t respond they are removed from the list.

I agree with the email asking them to reaffirm interest (and have ust suggested that in the prior thread, before this one started) but not the removal criterion for bouncing. Most often they're bouncing not of their own choice and there are already ways to deal with bouncing. (Sometimes. ;)
 
--
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 sort of see some utility to this but totally disagree with how "idle" would be defined. We have many members who just lurk and then suddenly, sometimes even years later, pop up to say how they've been following and totally appreciate xyz message or whatever.  Second, the bouncing criterion seems off. There is already a mechanism to set members to "bounced" (red B) as distinct from "bouncing" (blue B). "Hard bouncing for 30 days" already has a parallel (and more precise in terms of group activity) definition in bounce handling to set someone to "bounced" (red B) and a group moderator can easily see those by looking in the "bouncing" members page. I also strongly disagree with your third criterion. "Activity" doesn't include "reading  messages," which people may be doing even if they don't do anything else, and 30 days is much too short. And finally, it's the"Special Notices" members who most often, at least in my group, are really the "idle" ones.

I think it should be up to the members themselves to say whether or not they actively want to stay in a group, regardless of how introverted or extroverted they've behaved in it.
--
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 Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:41 AM, Chris Jones wrote:

I was thinking about reducing the costs of free group

Ah, I get it. That totally makes sense as part of the limits of a free offering.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 04:29 PM, Peter Cook wrote:

Personally I'd prefer that any deletion in a premium group

Very fair point; I should have made it clear that I was thinking about reducing the costs of free groups; paid - for groups are not only covering their own costs but those of the free groups as well.

Disclosure: all my subscriptions are to free groups, although my "jurisdiction" only covers one of them. And I would exempt the GMF as well!

Chris

--

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:19 AM, Chris Jones wrote:

I greatly doubt if anyone does a search on it for anything specific going back that far.

Good thought; however, my $.02:

One of my groups has an archive going back to 2001, and some of our members do use it. (It contains valuable neighborhood history.) Personally I'd prefer that any deletion in a premium group be at the discretion of the owner, not GIO.

{Pete

I would also find it useful to know who is active and who isn't. Another way to go about it would be to have a sortable "Last Post Date" column in the member list. Then the owner could decide what threshold to use.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 03:53 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

Ads are not an option.

And thus there need to be alternative strategies for "balancing the books";

Mark: One thought (and I mean thought; this is not a suggestion!) is that over time the biggest cost associated with any group is the amount of storage it uses up, or at least I assume it is; please tell me if I am mistaken. 

New "free" groups no longer have a storage allowance for Files and Photos (other than attachments) but as time passes more and more space is required for a message archive. Is there a case for limiting how long messages are stored? Would it free up sufficient storage if individual groups released the older part of their message archives?

The group I co - own has an archive going back to 2002, and I greatly doubt if anyone does a search on it for anything specific going back that far. With most members seeming to rely on email communications rather than the web UI it seems (on the face of it) that an archive going back to the beginning of tiime may not be all that useful.

Any such approach might require an owner or moderator to have the ability to tag any given topic as "important; not for deletion" so that it does remain to be found in some future search.

Would this thought go any way in containing your costs?

Chris