Forum Moderators: phranque
Anyway, because of the need to save money I used to use Yahoo groups for both my newsletter and my discussion forums, at least until a month ago.
About a month ago I moved to a new host that provides PHP support, and as a result decided to toss Yahoo groups and moved to a php/mysql free email list script. My subscription rate has more than doubled in the last month, with big numbers of visitors signing up for the newsletters. Yesterday I broke the 10k pages in a single day after the second newsletter from this new software. Happy happy me!
I see a significant amount of resistance to the use of Yahoo groups in this. My visitors don't even want to sign up for group membership using the email only option, much less the complicated process of getting a Yahoo profile.
There's even more pain in using an email group such as Yahoo groups when compared with your own in-house discussion forums. I have a second Yahoo group where I used to host our discussions, but I'll only keep that alive now as a message archive. I moved to one of the free php/mysql forum packages out there (sticky me if you want to know which one), and I've also gained a four fold increase in the numbers of posts in the last month.
My visitors have gone up - they are increasing all the time, but that rate of increase seems fairly constant to me and not responsible for this big jump.
IMO there are so many disadvantages with Yahoo groups that I'm unlikely to ever use them (or a service with similar features) again. I guess all you professionals out there already knew this and would only ever have used in house stuff anyway. :)
Eventually I will also be switching, I just haven't taken the time yet (too many other priorities on the site!).
(My site is also a hobby site and non-commercial.)
I'd strongly recommend you do that as soon as possible - I wish I'd done this six months ago. :)
Of course I'm grateful for Yahoo's free service, but I can't believe how much it hampered my site's progression.
However so far I am not sure how mush we would lose from the move. I think yahoo keeps your lists fairly clean. Im assuming we would have to do more housekeeping. And I cant remember now, but at the time i remember thinking to myself a few other functions of yahoo groups that we would miss. - (the quite sophisticated user management functions for example) - maybe the free listing on their groups directory? Iknow there are a lot of advantages of going in house, but at the time i felt there were not enuff to justify the changeover and work involved in it.
Anybody other comments by people who have made the change and whether my concerns are ill founded? Very inteersted in more opinions.
I remember when yahoo groups used to be egroups, and before that when it was onelist - those were the golden days...
Realistically Yahoo have reduced the service to something which nobody who knows what a real mailing list is like would even consider using. It's sad when people like Yahoo buy up services just to run them into the ground.
- Tony
