Slashdot Mirror
Users Revolt Over Yahoo Groups Update
An anonymous reader writes "The new NEO format of Yahoo Groups is being rolled out to users and there is no option to go back. Users and moderators are posting messages asking Yahoo to go back to the old format. Yahoo is responding with a vanilla 'thank you for your feedback we are working to make it better' comment. Most posters are so frustrated that they just want the old site back. One poster writes 'Yahoo has effectively destroyed the groups, completely, themselves.'"
This is why users should use open source software and run their own web sites.
The major problem is it doesn't work on AOL dialup accounts very well.
It also shits itself in IE5.
They didn't hire the same guy that killed Netflix's "favorities" lists a couple years ago ...?
> "Marissa! The users are revolting!"
> "I know, but how do they feel?" (rimshot)
Personally, I think shaking things like this up is exactly what Yahoo should be doing. I left Yahoo about ten years ago and haven't looked back since. As long as they keep instigating (or planting) stories like this there's a greater and greater chance that I'll come back for another look.
When is there a major update to a platform without a "revolt"?
I've stuck with Gmail through several "improvements." When they finally made their latest "improvement" mandatory, I was very happy to find that their html interface was still functional, and even more happy to find that I still thought it was pretty darn good.
Hopefully Yahoo will reinstate a similar option enough people complain. So... excuse me now while I go complain to Yahoo instead of you yahoos.
Anyone remember the old My.Yahoo.Com? Those were the good old days. I'd still be using Yahoo if they hadn't gone and f'd up the old My.Yahoo.com. It was the same thing as this. They had something that worked, that people liked and came back for. Then they "upgraded it" to the point it wasn't usable anymore and they lost users. Yahoo has a track record of jacking up a good thing and this new Gal in charge is doing nothing more than proving that Yahoo hasn't got a clue and will continue to screw things up until the entire board is replaced. In fact, they need to ditch everyone in corporate management. Better yet, just close. Just close while some of us still remember when Yahoo wasn't a joke.
Ignoring your users is the new in thing for corporations. From Microsoft cancelling Technet to their lack of Start Menu to Apple's upcoming flattening of IOS to Mechwarrior's ignoring users being pissed about changes or Digg's substantial drop in users with their new version a while back.
The attitude seems to be "it doesn't matter how many users we lose or alienate, were right and your wrong". Once upon a time marketing departments measured their success by number of new users gained. Nowadays UI departments seem to measure their success by number of users they lose.
Change is hard for a lot of people. Yahoo Groups, unfortunately is stuck running some really ancient "forum" software that really isn't designed to be a forum at all. It's designed to be an email list. I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features. Neo brings a lot of basic forum features to Yahoo Groups, like inline attachments. The people asking for the old format back, change is hard, embrace it and move forward. Ask Yahoo to fix bugs you find in Neo, that will be much better for the community than to continue being stuck in the old ways.
Joseph Elwell.
as fark learned - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI (NOTACON 8: You'll Get Over It: How NOT to Redesign Fark )
Is there anything Yahoo! hasn't fucked up? First they killed Geocities; OK that one is probably not bad. Then they Bing-ified Flickr, with complete disregard for community input. Trust me, there was a lot of input, even though most of it has been disappeared. Then sports, which we recently read about. Now groups. No wonder that CEO of theirs won't let people work from home. She wants to personally see the look of agony and defeat on her employees tired, worn faces as she takes their favorite projects and warps them into a monstrous, blinged-out, totally useless pile of shit.
I'm becoming convinced that Yahoo is the secret troll branch of Google.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The protests on Flickr after changes months ago had the same result: no changes, no apologies. /. published a story about protests when some other Yahoo page changed, same result: no change, no apologies.
And just the other day
People need to understand Yahoo is marching off the cliff to the beat of its own drummer, and complaints mean nothing to them.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
The platform sucked ever since they bolted their in-house crap onto the acquired (far superior for its time) eGroups system.
I think I'm going to launch my company "RolledBack"(TM,soon...).
I am going to list all free services with a decent user base out there on the web and wait for the owner company to shut it down or break it. Then, in a matters of day, I will open a similarly looking platform and advertise it broadly to people disappointed from loosing the look'n'feel of their old medium.
Et voilà!
"Marissa! The users are revolting!"
"Let them eat our new interface."
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
yahoo turning anything to crap since 20 years. Mourn geocities chatrooms.
And in other news, Google has rolled out their monthly gratuitous GMail revamp. And no one even noticed, because we've all gotten tired of hunting down the "please give me back the old interface" checkbox somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of the user options pages.
Ah well, at least Slashdot limits its retarded UI crippling and eye-bleed-inducing changes to twice a decade. Hmm, probably due any day now...
No big loss. The changes to Flickr were unforgivable though.
I have almost never viewed any major site's overhaul as an improvement. It usually ends up just complicating (or even rendering impossible) the things I use it for. Invariably, there was nothing "wrong" with the site's functionality as it was that needed "fixing," but they decided to mess with it anyway. Maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but when something works fine as it is, I'm a firm advocate for leaving well enough alone.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
And they stink too!
They do something like this every couple of years, each time driving off a fair number of users. I can only imagine that they've been trying to slowly kill off that division through attrition.
Just for comparison, Google's UI updates seem to be clearly superior. They're more in your face, intuitive, and I always feel it's a vertical move. Yahoo's updates are so-so and sometimes hide old functionality and just give me the feeling that it's a horizontal change and probably not related to making my experience better. You used to be able to see Yahoo profile updates (I'm on their answers forum a lot), but now that menu bar icon is gone from almost all Yahoo pages (oddly, it shows up as an artifact on some pages entered through only some routes) and you get a batch email maybe once a day.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Okay from the summary I get that Yahoo Groups was reformatted and users don't like it. One question: WHY?
How was it changed? What about it don't they like? etc.
From TFA: "it was immediately inundated with unhappy netizens who grumbled that the overhaul was glitchy, difficult to navigate and "severely degraded".
Okay that helps a little bit. But more detail would be more helpful.
"[They changed the old] interface to one dubbed "neo" that appeared to have been quickly spewed on to the interwebs with little testing before going live"
Okay so it is glitchy. At least that will probably be worked out in a few weeks.
The first link is better, where the user lists every gripe with every feature and explains why their existing workflow was destroyed by the update. None of that made it into the summary, though. Just outrage.
TL;DR - summary is bad and you should feel bad
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
...if anyone could get the new Gmail compose to work.
Back when Google acquired Deja News I had a terrible premonition about how it would all turn out. It languished for a while, with trolls and spammers flooding groups through Google accounts and then Google finally started working on making the interface horrible.
I had some really neat newsreaders on my Sun Linux box, where were awesome for surfing news and posting, back when you needed a verified account to post. Now Google Groups is nearly abandoned, because Google opened Pandora's box upon it. A real loss there.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The problem with "listening to your users" is that the vast majority of feedback you get is going to be negative. People don't usually go to the trouble to post "Yea, love it!" or "Awesome redesign!" or "I totally don't care one way or the other!" You can not please everyone. Just look at comments on any Slashdot or DPReview (the most negative place on the internet) article. Sure, sometime you bone it up, but the only way to really tell is to watch your stats and see if you are really losing users or not.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Well, try Yahoo! The comics page has gone from "intermittently updated" to "virtually unusable." The mail apps now make it almost impossible to delete email in any other way but one at a time. Good usable interfaces are being carefully and methodically destroyed.
Is there some committee at Microsoft and Yahoo that goes around finding anything that's simple, obvious and workable and making sure that it's made unusable as quickly as possible? How does this work? Have ex-congressman moved to the software industry?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yahoo's upgrades are, for the most part, unwanted. They break things and even if you ignore the bugs and lost data, the new way to use groups, either as a user or moderator, isn't easier. It is actually harder. On top of that, IMHO the new look is just plain ugly. I subscribe to about 20 Y! groups and for the most part have stopped using them. Now I only check to see if the group owner makes an announcement of the migration of the group to a new provider.
It needed a redesign. How hard is it to show a topic tree properly? The initial page is buggy right now, enter a search and that search stays persistent on everything you click on. Had to edit the URL to get rid of it. Once you're browsing a group it looks mostly like I remember except for the huge picture banner up top. That needs to go.
I've already seen fixes implemented that fixed a lot of initial issues I noticed.
Like no previous/next navigation. It's still a bit clunky and I could do without the giant banner at the top of the page that takes up 30% of my screen real estate but I suspect they'll continue improving it.
So Yahoo doesn't roll back (just like any other company who makes changes), and instead are replying to threads in the forums by saying "we are aware of the issue, this is planned to be fixed", but it is not fast enough for you.
You then write a blog about it. When that doesn't get what you want, you go to slashdot?
Sounds like someone is having a tantrum.
Change is hard for a lot of people. Yahoo Groups, unfortunately is stuck running some really ancient "forum" software that really isn't designed to be a forum at all. It's designed to be an email list. I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features. Neo brings a lot of basic forum features to Yahoo Groups, like inline attachments. The people asking for the old format back, change is hard, embrace it and move forward. Ask Yahoo to fix bugs you find in Neo, that will be much better for the community than to continue being stuck in the old ways.
Joseph Elwell.
Her's a kick in the balls.
I know change is hard and you want to go back to not having swollen-blue-balls, but embrace it and move forward. Sooner or later, you'll become accustomed to me kicking you in the balls. Don't be so resistant to change.
There's still Usenet. Peer to peer, fully distributed, works with multiple clients, no ads, fully operational.
You can sign a web petition to ask Google to let people turn it off
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/say-no-to-the-new-gmail-composer/
New designs always stress how much 'simpler' they are. The only way to simplify things that work well is to simply remove functionality. Gmail is a good example of this philosophy. Apparently users keep getting dumber so user interfaces have to keep up with them.
The Digg Liberals were the ones who turned Digg into just another liberal media outlet - which fared as well economically as every other liberal media outlet, as in not at all. The "Digg Patriots" (of which I was never a member - just a bystander who agreed with them) were just a handful of guys attempting to bring some balance back into Digg, but were vastly outnumbered by the Digg Liberals doing exactly the same thing the Digg Patriots were (backchannel communications and massive group diggs/buries against ideological foes) only in numbers an order of magnitude greater than any Digg Patriot action... right at the end it was not uncommon to see a thoughtful conservative comment get 300 buries in ten minutes.
Just as in government, it was sad to see liberals destroy value so very quickly. No-one wants to listen to parrots endlessly squawking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
yes, all 4 users revolt.
Seeing this I had to laugh remembering an episode of Parks and Recreation where the town keeps promoting the use of Altavista when the rest of the world has moved on.
By the way, its ridiculous to complain about the use of a free service. If they were paying money for it then they have a right to complain, but using a free service leaves you prone to the whims of the company. If you don't like their policies then by all means please fire up your own Linux server and serve your own GD blog.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The real mistake Yahoo made was in taking way, way too long to overhaul any of its web properties. So when the necessary change finally happens, it's now a lot of pain for the users. If Yahoo had made incremental changes over the years there would not have been nearly as much furor.
I hope they do ignore the users, because over time issues will get fixed and most users will get back to using the systems - along with a bunch of new people that may finally find it usable instead of being driven away by a terribly old interface.
Yahoo has generally ignored the complaints about Flickr, which I credit them for staying the course. It's way to easy to get distracted by people yelling on the internet these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
cry me a goddamn river. shouldnt have been using a for profit companies shit anyways. I worked for yahoo for 2 years and tried to blow the whistle on the whole prism bullshit (which I regreddibly helped create in a small way) what I learned is that there are good people who work there but as a general rule there are also completely insane assholes who dont give a shit about justice, freedom, etc. also.
There is nothing worse than the sort of nerd that hates any change. How can you consider yourself intelligent and technical when the slightest change in a website turns you into a big crying pussy?
Also, this doesn't seem to be *that* big of a deal. The only website that comes reomtely close to being credible that's reporting on this is The Register and sorry, the Register operates who I would imagine Fox News would be run if converted to target only sexually frustated gossiping old women.
This is a non-event.
They already killed the groups for me when they announced that RSS alerts would be removed, then quietly removed ALL RSS altogether. I'd designed my web site to grab the latest articles and display them inline (including a group I'd created just for site announcements), and they destroyed it. I haven't had time to code a replacement, which would either be some barbaric screen-scraping garbage that belongs in the 1990s or a complete move to something else.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This debacle started around Tuesday of last week. The implementation has been so bad, it is like somebody in the Groups team woke up last Tuesday and decided to just piss all over everything. There was no warning it was coming. They just flipped the switch. Moderators were not able to approve users or messages for days. Images have gone missing in many cases. HTML formatting is broken or has been removed completely, leaving pages of gibberish. A week later there are still broken features. The problems are not even uniform across Groups. Of the dozen or so Groups I belong too, I never know from one logon to the next what will work or won't work. Thousands of people have been complaining in the support forums over the changes. This is not a case were a few people had their panties in a wad over changing a web feature from brown to yellow. Thousands of users have been dog piling onto support entries with comments. Some constructive, others, not so much. What was interesting to me was that there was virtually 0 coverage of these problems in tech media. This is the first story I have seen. If Google had done this with their groups or docs or other applications, I feel there would have been significantly more coverage. The lack of the tech media to take notice, I feel, has had a significant impact on how Yahoo has addressed these problems with the Groups changes. If Yahoo pisses off thousands of users and all the tech journo's are deaf, dumb. and blind, did it make a noise?
Facebook rearranges their site every other week, it has the most inconsistent interface, they bury or change features all of the time, it's a miracle their users don't revolt.
"One poster writes 'Yahoo has effectively destroyed the groups, completely, themselves.'"
No, they did that back in 2006, along with that stupid avatar stuff.
The 2006 diaspora was huge.
But it sure did reduce their traffic costs.
--
BMO
There's a similar though smaller revolt going on over the changes to Yahoo's Fantasy Football. The nasty thing about the Fantasy Football changes is that they didn't roll them out until two weeks before the start of the season, after lots of people had already paid as much as $250 to join pro leagues.
Yahoo went so far as to post an announcement to every league that they won't be going back to the original format (but they really appreciate your comments!).
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
I am gratefull for these Yahoo stories the last few months. I keep forgetting Yahoo even exists. I visit them about as often as I do AOL.
It's their passive-aggressive way of fighting the NSA: losing users.
1. Are any of the morons posting actual Yahoo users? (I know the answer to this one... didn't think so)
2. I personally liked how google did with the whole upgrade to our new interface when you're ready and we'll bug you periodically to do so approach. Radical UIX changes have almost never been received in a positive light... ever. Doesn't mean they're bad changes, it's just proven that average users can't deal with rapid change of a UIX like developers can. But again, the customer is the average user, so shame on Yahoo for not recognizing this overwhelming trend.
This is exactly what Usenet, particularly moderated groups, used to be great at. Now it's easier to catch leprosy than find an ISP that provided Usenet access. [Weeps]
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I know that many flickr users were very disappointed with the changes to flickr, but it prompted many of them to move to ipernity. Now ipernity has redesigned their site to be more similar to flickr, and it has a facility to import images from your flickr account. It is 'welcoming' and does not purge content it doesn't like the way Yahoo does. So perhaps this is not such a tragedy...
The abomination called Yahoo! Groups
!!
Just this morning, I googled some product support info and was sent to the dreaded Groups site. Three messages into my investigation for an answer, I get the frickin login screen and I can't access my answer.
I don't want a Freaking! Yahoo! account. I just want my information.
> The mail apps now make it almost impossible to
> delete email in any other way but one at a time...
> Is there some committee at Microsoft and Yahoo
> that goes around finding anything that's simple,
> obvious and workable and making sure that it's
> made unusable as quickly as possible?
Another gem from the last mail update: instead of clicking column headings to sort, there is now a DROPDOWN MENU to sort. And no column headings. Also, you can't sort by size anymore.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This is the same exact "revolt" you see every time Facebook or Google update their interface, but give it a little time and people get used to the new interface and stop complaining. In fact, when they change it again in the future, the users "revolt" again, claiming that the previous version (which they once revolted against) was so much better.
This is really not news.
Nobody cares.
They say they they are sitting right next to Yahoo in the conference room, just across the table from Netscape and SGI. They are telling me that any Yahoo walking the streets in 2013 is most certainly an imposter, and possibly a time-traveling zombie. Whatever it is, they recommend a bullet to its head, just to be safe.
Hold on.
My teenagers are asking me "what is a yahoo?"
It is a good thing I have a copy of Gulliver's Travels on the book shelf for just such emergencies.
This is the third "users hate a redesign" story on slashdot in as many months. Do you have a Slow News Day button that randomly generates these?
Does Yahoo still exist? Isn't it a search engine?
Perhaps I frequent a particular kind of site, but overhauls invariably added more scripts to be loaded, more functionality to be broken (example: open in new tab doesn't work because links are now javascripted) and plain weirdness (see the Gawker sites where divs float rampant over each other when resizing the window).
I firmly believe in function over form. And I think most sites can be improved greatly by removing 99% of the "cleverness" the developers added to justify their wages.
I've run a few websites that got hit with bandwidth serving other peoples sites.
I solved it by nightly renaming all picture filenames to random strings and updating all pages to those new names. For added nastiness I made sure the old names got re-used to serve some "discouraging content".
My bandwidth dropped to normal in a few days. Never was bothered again. And all from a single nightly cron job.
Isn't Yahoo groups a haven for perverts anyway? I love you jerks that say change is hard just embrace, crap is crap even if it is change. But what I really can't get over is what a major hypocrite John Kerry is, he should be in prison for the war crimes he admitted years ago anyway. Then you have John McButt playing poker while he decides who lives and who dies, even if they are brown people, for shame you filthy liberals.
Who is this yahoo company?
http://xkcd.com/1172/
you say yourself, very succinctly I might add, why this is 'news'
Exactly! EVERY TIME...virtually...it's ridiculous and embarrassing to be that bad at design. Have you no shame??? Imagine this in another industry. Something pre-PC...say Craftsman Tools.
If Craftsman 'upgraded' from solid steel to a cheaper allow, stopped making Metric completely, and told users it was an 'improvement'
That's where we are at here...only it is worse, b/c Yahoo! spent millions on 'A/B testing'...
Google did this with their Image search. M$ does this for everything.
The computing industry is spoiled rotten. Treating end users this way is sure-fire way to destroy your company, but you have your M$'s and facebook.com's who throw the curve and give us in the industry a false expectation of how much we must cater to our user
facebook, yahoo, google....they're all on a big ego trip...they mistake the glory and riches bestowed by the computing industry as something that **they did**
in the end, the founders of these companies were competent engineers and in the right place at the right time
the functionality of their products is everyday technology...mostly software and code
ex: facebook...it's just words and pictures with a user login. the rest is shit to make Zuckerberg money. Sure their codebase is probably pretty well designed and impressive...but it is nothing that couldn't be replicated...facebook.com has to work fast enough for humans, that's it...they meet that criteria and then its just maintenence.
no innovation there...
counter example: *clickwheel* on the iPod...that's a real, actual innovation done by engineers...it solved a user interface problem AND pioneered a new tech
internet companies are going to learn a very hard lesson soon....
I hope it is my company that is doing the teaching!!!$$$!!!$$$
Thank you Dave Raggett
For a short time, there were actually some conservative stories that made the front page of Digg. What happened in response is that the Digg Liberals simply turned up the number of sock puppets, and proceeded to bury them hard...
But it did have the effect of pointing out the extent to which Digg had become run by a group of liberal elitists, and also some juicy info about how some top Digg posters also secretly owned and ran a number of the websites the Digg Liberals were pushing.
So I would say counter-activism can work, you don't necessarily have to compromise your principals to do so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"The mail apps now make it almost impossible to delete email in any other way but one at a time. Good usable interfaces are being carefully and methodically destroyed."
That's why I use Thunderbird to read my various webmail accounts. I don't have to see their shit, and I have local copies if they lose theirs. (If you have Thunderbird Portable, just burn a copy of the program folder to DVD and your messages can't be wiped accident.)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
.
Tell you what. Let's go ahead and have you *moderate and run* (not just play with as an end user) a Yahoo group with 27,000 members in your spare time (as I do and have for many years). You get a week to do it with those "ancient" tools and interface, and then another week to do with with the badly broken, slow, ill-conceived, feature-poor, absurdly buggy new interface. After that week - if you can even get through it - come back and tell me that "Neo" is working just fine, thank you very much.
We won't even get started on your false dichotomy - that because some features might have been desired (eg inline attachments, which my users would never want or need) that it was necessary to completely revamp the entire interface and throw out about half the existing functionality to provide them.
While I'm not crazy about the new UI, that is the least of the problems with Neo. There were multiple problems with basic things any freshman programing student should be able to grasp as necessary for what Groups does and Neo couldn't do them. It is blatantly obvious that the programming team was given a firm deadline to roll out a new version and so despite it not being ready to use, it was rolled out because the deadline said it had to be. Now if Neo had been a new product, that might have been justified. Releasing alphaware and getting feedback from users can be a good thing. But releasing alphaware that breaks essential capabilities of the old version and simultaneously telling people they can't use the old version is idiocy unless the goal was to shrink the userbase enough to justify cancelling Groups altogether.
updating Yahoo groups is like pruning the rosebushes in a rural cemetery. While it may make the place look pretty to a casual passing visitor it doesn't help the users (who have all long since "passed on")
way back I used to admin or moderate, or be just a plain old vanilla member, of a large number of groups on Yahoo, mostly music groups for fans of various punk and garage rock bands.... by 2006'ish almost all the users had migrated to dedicated sites (official or fan run) but some of the groups limped on for a few years before becoming zombies, and last time I checked in (early 2009'ish) most hadn't had a single post for over 2 years...
I stuck my head in now and it is a mess.. obviously sometime after 2009 they had a purge 'cause every single one of the music groups I was in has gone, uterly and completely. But the main thing is the whole interface is unusable... there are probably no more than a couple of dozen acts in the music section, most alphabetical listings are empty, the interface is even worse than that buzz kill vomit job inflicted on Flickr - and laughably - to hide the dearth of acts they simply reload the list artists ...over and over and over again as you scroll but while that might do something if you have enough groups to make a t least a page but in those few categories that even have groups it's just a long list of the same two or three bands/artist repeated over and over again..... and most of these groups haven't had a post in years if not months . do not want , will not return. it can stay mouldering in its grave
Group with >200 members, active daily postings, multiple databases every week, and large photo repository for our members. We were recently very frustrated with the more and more frequent and longer lasting delays in email delivery, but the Yahoo Neo experience is simply horrible. This seems to be still in pre-Beta stage. Dropping it on users without even the slightest explanation or warning, using us as test bunnies, is an abysmal business practice.
Many of our group members access the group databases via mobile devices. The layout on iPhones is scrambled such that it is barely legible. But the fact that the new design doesn't even load on iPads is infuriating. The picture on our home screen is gone. The ability to save pictures from albums is gone. As we were depending on smooth functioning of our group (hello - like, now - not when Marissa comes back from her next photo shoot!), we have already moved the databases to Google. We will move the email traffic shortly and close down our group.
Somebody tell Yahoo to get rid of sponsored emails.
They put these stupid spamming emails at the top of your inbox, and you can't delete them.
FU Yahoo.
the change will only hasten the move to Facebook and other sites. Yahoo has proven that the old dog did not learn anything.
Thousands of complaints/"suggestions" to go back.. yet they persist in shoving down their users throats change that they hate and find non-functional. For anyone who wants the older version of yahoo sports, go to sports.yahoo.ca eh?
They're just a bunch of whining Yahoo's. :-)
-- john
I've had the same problem with Yahoo email. Doesn't work a lot of the time, ever since the "upgrade".
Are you saying that facebook.com's codebase would be especially well made, or especially 'chicken scratch'?
From what I've heard, developers sometimes just put new code in for a new feature and it seems to me as if there's no overarching careful design or "code-base grooming".
So, especially "chicken scratch". (Though granted, it usually works.)
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Yahoo already screwed up their groups a long time ago. Hmm Could it be that they are trying to get rid of them... Like they already have did with some other parts of the old web
word I'm with you...
man, the facebook.com thing has been stuck in my mind lately as I've been learning PHP...
see, I'm 34 and my dad was a Navy cryptographer and electronics instructor so I was exposed to this stuff really early on. Lucky me.
so I had an idea of pre-digital computing as a kid (my dad used punch cards!), and the entire PC and digital revolution has pretty much happened during my lifetime...for sure on the consumer side.
I'm not alone in having a sort of natural understanding of things! Most people my age, especially the kids who were lucky enough to have internet access in the mid-90s, see things the way I do.
heh...I said all that to say this:
like many others my age, I *knew* that myspace.com and freindster.com were inferior and that all a site needed was basic functions like a profile picture, friend list, messaging, etc to become HUGE
no one had done it...correction...no one had done it with the discipline to keep the adware and bullshit (rendering it unusable)
facebook learned from google's victory over yahoo! in search...they kept it plain and simple...
then they did their little 'rich kid only' phased launch...a dastardly, if effective way to market a product
to the point: even though tons of people *knew* a facebook-type site would be highly successful, no one wanted to take the risk to maintain an unprofitable company as long as Zuck and Parker did...basically they were willing to bullshit everyone with talk of a 'new way to interact' crap until they could get a big enough valuation for an IPO
they were rich kids, had the money to be unprofitable for years...
BUT they also, as a group, did most of the coding themselves for the beginning...and continue to have major input if not in fact run the show...
Dustin Moskovitz I gather was the lead programmer, but Zuck was no slouch...he did significantly contribute to the codebase.
So they were rich, stubborn, AND had a basic level of coding competence.
As I said above, as far as I can tell, 90% of their codebase is shit to make Zuckerberg more money...the actual functionality, minus ads and data harvesting...
How difficult would it be to implement that on a scale that could handle 10^9 scale users?
Not server side, just the website code?
Using todays HTML, CSS3 and standards...could one person code a basic facebook clone without much help?
What do you think about all this? Thanks for your input.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I realize that chaning user interfaces is painful; but once you get used to the new interface, usually you prefer it over the old one.
But in this case, I must say that the new interface totally sucks.
I've been a loyal and grateful Yahoo!Group user for a good decade+, with over 100 groups I manage.
Until now, they've not changed their interface at all -- except a couple of tiny things -- for that whole time. That's one of the things I loved about them -- consistency.
I can't find stuff in the new interface. They have all kinds of links I have no use for.
The new layout is so different it's like a completely different product from a different company. As a user/group manager, It's about as radical a change as if I were an auto mechanic, and all the sudden all the cars coming in are electric cars but I only know how to work on ICEs.
By the way, I don't like their new logo either.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Correction. I just checked, and I have 223 groups at Yahoo!Groups.
Another thing I don't like about the new UI is that the urls for the pages are different now. That's going to take a while to get used to and to learn the new syntax.
One thing I do like about the new format is the look of the group home page. However, I can't see how to edit the backdrop image. hunt hunt.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
I use a number of Yahoo groups quite extensively, and simply haven't noticed any change in the format. The emails come in , the emails go out ; no change.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
the truth runs much-much deeper.
first, it you love or hate conspiracy theorys hold on.
as everyone should already know the NSA has recorded your phone/e-mail/fax/text's/IM's for many years now. lawsuits back in 1996 prove the existance of the data logging.
as you also know every ISP and e-mail provider has opened a direct link to the NSA for recording of your information.
why 'groups' was a problem.
first, you start a topic and the e-mail goes out to 5,000 people. someone replies, the same 5,000 people...
some of my groups were getting 1,000 posts per month. you can imagine the amount of storage for the exact same e-mail.
and, if you noticed, often people would simply add a line, then reply and a single post could become multiple pages long.,
so, what yahoo did was to block access to your e-mail unless you agreed that they are totally not responsible for turning your information over to the Fed's, and now altered the groups to cut way down on the amount of information being blasted back and forth.
so, get with the times, you are being tracked, and right now, you don't have a thing to worry about.
but, if you watched the boston marathon event, the NSA released all the data of the kids e-mails and contacts and text's and tweets and IM's from the previous years so they could track them down and all of the people they contacted.
welcome to big brother.
now, with that knowledge, you can be certain yahoo cannot just return to the cosy forums of yestarday. the whole reason was to change the way the data is handled.
as jessie james said, if you want to be an outlaw, don't break the law.
All that's left are dog lover groups? Not even close.
Yahoo groups is also used by Doctors, Lawyers, Adoption Groups, Medical Facilities, Teachers, and more. They not only changed it, they actually BROKE it. Mod tools don't work, spammers are attacking with no way to stop them. functions aren't working, controls are disabled. Years and years of archives are missing, photos are missing or messed up from their correct order and albums. People are devastated over this and over 43,000 votes to put it back are on the top complaint post in the feedback thread. Look in the comments UNDER the dog post, and you'll find the rest there are over 216 pages of the comments under that topic alone...not to mention another 264 pages of complaints with their own batch of comments.
They use these groups to communicate about medications and treatments, provide support for bedriddenn people, connect families with unwanted children, and adopt dogs to new homes. This is NOT a resistance to change thing. This is real, hurting real people. It's causing High blood pressure in elderly. It's causing migraines from the blinding white screen. Disabled can't use it, Blind can't use it, and less experienced computer users can't use it. Freecycle groups had a serious problem, they discovered their personal information was being made public in threir group to everyone.
This is not a little problem. Over half a million users have already quit, and we have mobilized to get Yahoo's attention. We've been at it about 9 days, and finally connected with a Yahoo real live person who is being directed to my group to monitor it and learn about these issues. I'm sure the the people who should know all this, don't, because my guess is no one wants to tell them how bad it is. Well I am, and my group is. I'm the person who got Yahoo VP of operations, Jim Stoneham to come read my group in 2010, and he rolled back the remodel. We're hoping to do the same now. We've only just started contacting the media, so it's starting to creep out there.
Come check it out, you might be surprised.
Brenda
Nightowl >8#
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/modsandmembers/