Yahoo groups

Improving the web interface

[Scooter24]

I'm running a large Yahoo group dedicated to digital photography. The web interface of Yahoo groups desperately nees improvement in my opinion. There are broken URLs, ugly formatting problems, excessive ad usage - just to name a few issues.

To make an example, the software on which this forum is based, is light years ahead of the software Yahoo groups is based.

I'd like to contact somebody at Yahoo and send this person a list with suggested improvements. Whom could I contact? Any chance that they would listen to me?

[georgeek]

I would think the chances of them doing anything other than very minor updates is negligible. Have you thought of transferring everyone over to a BB? How many posts do you get a day?

[Scooter24]

We have 2400 members and 1300 posts/month. Moving to a new platform is not possible, as we would lose all message archives.

[georgeek]

I guess you have to weigh the loss of the archives against the benefits of modern forum software features but I wouldn't dismiss migrating out of hand. If you have regular posters who you know, you could appoint them as moderators on a new board. If you all worked together in setting it up and just posted on the group once a day saying it had moved you could probably start the new board without too much trouble. If you have people posting at the moment in spite of the problems and lack of features I imagine the new board would grow pretty quickly. Why not talk it over with the regular posters and see what they think.

[Marketing Guy]

You should definitely put thought into moving to a dedicated system - I used Yahoo groups for a while but the ads jsut drove me crazy! :)

And wouldnt ya just love to have all that juicy content on yer own site? ;)

Scott

[Scooter24]

You should definitely put thought into moving to a dedicated system

Well, then I would have to maintain that system and pay for hosting and bandwidth - and wouldn't get anything monetary in return.

[Marketing Guy]

There are a lot of decent hosting companies out there that offer reasonable prices / bandwidth and support what's necessary for forum software.

I have one site on a basic professional package (£9.95 per month) which more than cover's what I need for 1000 visitors per day (around 80mb bandwidth per day) and I reckon it will be good up to around 1500 - 2000 visitors per day.

Scott

[georgeek]

Well, then I would have to maintain that system and pay for hosting and bandwidth - and wouldn't get anything monetary in return.

If you can't spare the $200/annum and 20 minutes a day that it costs me to run an ASP forum and you can't see any worthwhile intangible benefits either then I guess you will have to keep bitching to Yahoo.

Good luck!

[Scooter24]

If you can't spare the $200/annum and 20 minutes a day that it costs me to run an ASP forum and you can't see any worthwhile intangible benefits either then I guess you will have to keep bitching to Yahoo.

Well, I have a site which I use to sell my photos. Then there is this support group for a specific digital camera, which is a side activity, and which by the way takes a sizable amount of my time even if I don't manage the technology. I'm the group owner and it takes some effort to make sure that everything runs smooth (no spamming, flaming, trolling etc.). I have set up a team of moderators, but still find myself committing a lot of my time to this users group. If I also had to take care of the technology, this amount of time would go up even further.

I might add that I can't use this users group to promote my pictures, as it's a group for enthusiasts of this digital camera.