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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.'"
The thing is you have a service that fills all your needs, is free, and requires absolutely zero knowledge of how anything works.
Why wouldn't the average person want something like that, and why are there so few alternatives out there that do the job?
That's a silly answer for most non-technical users.
Ignoring the extra hassle of hosting, an open source project can head in a direction you don't like just as easily, and unless you are prepared to fork the product (which a non-technical user probably can't) or just let it stagnate in a soup of unpatched exploits, you are just as helpless.
Indeed: with private dedicated servers and VPSes getting cheaper and cheaper, there's less and less of an excuse to rely on public servers.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
When is there a major update to a platform without a "revolt"?
I used to run my own web site. The modest fees didn't bother me; but the image leaches did. There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst. Yeah, there are little scripts and things using the referrer tag; but then I couldn't preview my pages on my hard drive. OK, I suppose I could have run a server on localhost... but... you see where this goes. You get pulled into "tag soup" and having to install every scripting language that begins with 'P' just to show people some stupid pictures.
So. I was drawn towards Flickr. In the back of my mind I knew it could always morph into something I hated; but for the longest time it didn't. Then it got Marissa'd.
So here we are again. Some company with a business that somebody finds unsatisfying even though it's profitable. They throw away the existing customers in hopes of attracting other customers. I hope Yahoo ends up like JCPenney now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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 )
Why are there so few alternatives? Because egroups and onelist merged and yahoo bought them
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.
This is why users should use open source software and run their own web sites.
That's a whole new level of technical difficulty. Many people who run yahoo groups are barely able to do it, and if you've ever used one you'll know that hosting your own is much more difficult. Not difficult at all for a tech, but for an average user?
Heck people will be happy with Geocities again.
People hate change. But people need change.
You tweak any thing on the internet you are going to get a bunch of whiny complainers.
I have gotten complains back in my BBS days.
Why have you switched to using color ANSI, ASCII text was so much faster.
Why have you added an option to use RIP graphics, I don't want to download a new terminal emulator, but I want to see the new graphics.
Your BBS is too slow for me using my 300bps modem.
You have added a new door game, and you changed your menu to show it. Things look different I hate it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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...
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
Not all posts advocating FOSS as the solution to all of lifes problems in the face of pragmatism are trolls. Some people legitimately have this mindset. I recognized the nick from an earlier discussion, otherwise I would have assumed troll (there's probably some meaning that can be taken from that).
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!
He's trolling, you idiot.
I totally read this in the voice of the dungeon master on the Dead Alewives' "Dungeons and Dragons: Satan's Game" spoof. This is advanced, Mark!
Or you can, you know, just roll with it. One community implodes, another one opens to take its place. If it's one thing I've learned to accept about the internet, is that the only constant is change.
Life is not for the lazy.
...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
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
If you don't want your "images" stolen, then don't put them up on the internet. Period.
Alternatively you can put low res images up, and let your paying folks know that they can have higher res images for whatever you think you can get out of them. If you're not charging people for your images, then leeches aren't stealing anything.
Fact of the matter is, this is settled. You can make it hard for people to leech, but it will still happen, and there is nothing you can do about it. Those people are NOT your customers.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
But, there's always the possibility that Yahoo rolled out a shitty, ugly, and useless update and people are genuinely pissed off.
Based on what they did with email a few months ago (stuck with them since they host the webmail for my ISP), Yahoo is certainly capable of rolling out something pretty awful.
Yes, someone will always bitch about change. But sometimes, change isn't for the better. It's amazing how often web sites update their site and produce something which is utter crap. And I'm perfectly willing to believe Yahoo has done that in this case.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Fact of the matter is, this is settled. You can make it hard for people to leech, but it will still happen, and there is nothing you can do about it. Those people are NOT your customers.
I run a small site that is mostly a personal photo blog. I keep an eye on the logs, and when one of my images gets a lot of hits, it's obviously being leeched. I just replace it with Goatse or something similar. If it happened often enough, I'd automate it.
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.
Hello! Former technical Yahoo here. Were you there when TK was CEO? That's when it was fun. Since then not so much and I'm happy to have moved on...
Why are there so few alternatives? Because egroups and onelist merged and yahoo bought them
And Google bought up Deja News and made a complete mess of that.
Reading the Yahoo official resonse...
We deeply value how much you, our users, care about Yahoo! Groups ... we launched our first update to the Groups experience in several years and while these changes are an important step to building a more modern Groups experience, we recognise that this is a considerable change.
We are listening to all of the community feedback and we are actively measuring user feedback so we can continuously make improvements.
I can only surmise they are arrogantly looking down their nose and their user community and scoffing "Stupid cretins, we are gods, do not anger us with your squealing like pigs.
It is this sort of thing that drives customers and related business away. Perhaps the better line of attack is to deluge advertisers ... or buy some premium tweets. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Image leaching isn't having your images taken and put up elsewhere on the web, which is a pointless to fight against if anyone wants your images bad enough. Image leaching is people linking and embedding images hosted on your server on their website. They are not only using your images, but more importantly, using your bandwidth to host their site. Of course the those people are not your customers, but they are continually using your resources, as in actual resources you don't get back when used. There are straightforward solutions to the problem, but it is yet another thing on a large pile of stuff that comes up with maintaining your own website.
If you're not charging people for your images, then leeches aren't stealing anything.
Except your bandwidth. Image leeches typically do things like linking your images to their MySpace page, or using them as the background image for some other website full of ad spam links, so you end up paying for their site. It wouldn't be so bad if they just "stole" your images by downloading them and using them themselves. The problem is that they don't download your images.
Breakfast served all day!
Hang on. I had a look at your site; it's a bunch of technically poor photographs of guys in bad shorts playing about in a junkyard. The idea that anybody would want to 'leach' these is totally surreal.
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.
Why wouldn't the average person want something like that, and why are there so few alternatives out there that do the job?
The problem is that, when you rely on another person to provide information, then it can disappear. They can do that a moment which is really really inconvenient to you. The "average" person has some problem thinking straight about this and will always tell you "oh I don't do anything important there" just like they say "oh there's nothing important to backup" and then find out that they lost all their grandchildren's photos. Even most of the rest of us that "know better" simply don't have the time.
Look, for example, at the recent betrayal by Groklaw, which gathered a whole load of interesting ideas and now leaves no clear place for it's community to go to.
What is needed is a reimplementation of Usenet with a limited subset of HTML (no external content) and automatic multi-source cryptographic moderation by default (so that anyone can moderate any group; nobody can censor, but you only listen to the people you want to). This could be gatewayed through tor for those that need privacy.
Anything less will always either be unusable for normal people (e.g. Freenet) or will be vulnerable to commercial destruction for example Yahoo; Groklaw; Skype; Google Reader; MSN TV.
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.
Why even have it web-based? Usenet used to fill the niche quite well and wasn't subject to the whims of a single for-profit company.
Image leeching is stupid and why anyone wouldn't treat it as an opportunity to mess with idiots guilt-free is beyond me.
Tim Berners-Lee created the web specifically so that you could link back to the original document/image/whatever
By your reasoning, outright stealing of images is somehow "better" than linking to them.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
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
I always use an e-mail client, be it Outlook (at work) or Thunderbird (at home) or my iPod Touch for accessing Gmail. That way, I just bypass their 'improvements'. The only time I have to go into their mail page is to be on chats at work, and I do not access my e-mails there.
Use cloudflare: no bandwith problem anymore
That's sort of the point though. Most of Yahoo's properties have been stagnant for years, some even for over a decade. Yahoo was the place for people who wanted web 1.0, are change resistant, and are stuck in their ways. Everyone who wanted new features or could embrace new things migrated along as better alternative popped up. Those that can't/won't remained. It's the AOL of the new millennium. It's a real challenge for Yahoo because it's a gamble that the people they will lose will be offset by newcomers.
Really, though, I think this whole "I'm taking my ball and going home" attitude is quite dumb. If you're willing to leave and learn a new platform in protest, why not stay and learn the new upgraded platform where your data already lives?
Do the updates sometimes break or remove good features? Yeah, I guess. But they've slowly been added back in over time. Basically, I see this as what Apple did with Final Cut Pro. A complete revamp that took a lot of time to gain feature parity with the version it replaced. Sometimes though it's good to clear out the dead wood so you can have a better platform for the future.
FWIW, as a paying Flickr Pro member since 2006, I love the changes. As a Fantasy Football commissioner using Yahoo as my platform since '09, I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well.
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.
Sounds more like it's how the internet is supposed to work - someone does something you don't like, and instead of just having to just live with it like you would in the real world, you can actually make some noise about it and get thousands of people to listen to you. It still may not change anything, but at least you know your complaint is heard unlike when you get a form letter response saying "We are aware of the issue, and we plan to fix it. Some day. Probably. Well maybe not - who knows if anyone is even reading your feedback".
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.
There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst.
I believe you mean 'image linking'. If you don't want people accessing your images, don't put them on the web. Similarly, if you don't want your images to disappear, don't put them on someone else's web site, particularly one where you don't pay for storage.
To be fair, users bellow over the tiniest of changes to UIs. If users got their way there would be no progress in the world. I don't use Yahoo Groups so this doesn't impact me whatsoever, but I'm all too familiar with the cries of pain from users who are afraid of even the tiniest change. To be fair it's *usually* not a good idea to make dramatic changes to your UI all at once. Changes should usually be made gradually over time. At the same time when/if your business is failing it's hard to say that Yahoo didn't need to make some big changes quickly in order to improve their business. These recent moves may cause the sinking ship to sink faster or may wind up being their salvation. Either way it's better than the slow crawl towards death they were taking before.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
You should have used an Apache configuration directive to send requests for an image to a 404 if it didn't have an appropriate referrer. No need to install anything, but it does require a real Web host that allows you to configure your own server.
Product stages:
- crap << current Yahoo Groups
- alpha
- beta
- pray
- live!
Unless you are Google, Then it goes
Product stages:
- crap
- alpha
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- beta
- Product Canceled due to excessive usefulness or popularity!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Maybe they were already leeched, so all you can look at is what's left viewable: a bunch of guys in bad shorts narfing around in a junkyard
Fortunately, that's exactly what I was looking for for my web site.
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?
"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.
You should have used an Apache configuration directive to send requests for an image to tubgirl if it didn't have an appropriate referrer..
FTFY.
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.
Didn't you understand his point? It *is* better for him for them to copy his images than to link to them. It doesn't cost him as much.
If he were running a high volume site, and this were done by a low volume site, this wouldn't have much effect. As he's running a low volume site, it can significantly raise his expenses.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Except, of course, your ISP will TOS you for hosting, and remote hosting costs.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If it is on the internet, it will be stolen. Deal with it.
I didn't care about non-commercial copying of the images. It was the bandwidth usage that bothered me. My site could go down and/or I could be charged if exceeded. If I was running my own server, I'd have to get hotter hardware to handle it. That's the theft that was bothering me, not copyright violations.
Yeah, stuff gets stolen on the Internet. I DID deal with it--by no longer hosting my own web site. In fact, I frequently saw leeching from my Flickr account, and it didn't bother me one bit. I was like, "fine, now it's Yahoo's problem"; but I realized I was trading one problem for another and it ultimately bit me. On to the next trade. Get it?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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...
OK. So (to get back to the thread) your recommendation is that non-technical users should run Apache with a custom configuration? This seems a bit silly to me.
Also, he already stated that there were technical solutions to the problem. But clearly this was just the final straw that caused him to decide that it wasn't worth running his own web site.
FWIW, I, also, don't find it worthwhile to run my own web site. I'm sure I could, but I don't want to bother. I can't even maintain enough interest to maintain a web site hosted for free on someone else's server. For every level of comitment, there's a reasonable choice. For me, it to avoid the bother. For him, it's to let someone else handle the hosting.
P.S.: I have, a few years ago, set up a website on an Apache install on my local system. So I'm pretty sure that the only thing keeping me away from running my own site is lack of interest. I could be wrong, as it wasn't an externally facing site...but I'm not interested enough to find out. But asking my wife to do even that much would be an exercise in futility. She's got a lot more interest than I do, but not enough to keep a blog running. (Well, she kept one running for 6 months or so a few years ago, but...)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Oh, they do revolt, but not for long. FB has become their primary way of keeping track of family and close friends, most of whom are non-techies who they can't convince to move over to Google+, so they stay on FB. It's the ol' networking effect in action.
Yahoo was always a joke. Yahoo is the company that started around the idea of having people index the web.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Or you are Steve Ballmer and feel you need to release the stuff to make the stock maintain its present value, never mind burning some bridges.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Suggestion to you and *everyone* (who doesn't want to run their own email server). Buy a domain name and use the registrar's email forwarding service (most of them have them). You then have non-generic email and aren't held hostage by your email provider.
I believe it started out pretty much as a mailing list service (and can still be used as such to a certain degree). I think the main advantage is the hosting of files related to the group.
Translation: "I somehow figured out how to install IIS, and then I forgot how to use google, so I gave up and shut down."
Yeah, right.
I thought the same thing but figured I would check out screens of the old against the new and hear what users were complaining about. The UI is really quite a bit cleaner and better organized, but the user and moderator complaints are entirely legit. They traded substance for style. There is absolutely core functionality missing, broken, or just outright removed. I'd say this is one of the few times the screeching is warranted.
I believe Red Matrix project, and their Comanche[1] (work in progress) is a step in the right direction.
OK, how about the fact that Yahoo! puts ads on the pages for AT&T email (which I *DO* pay for)?
Am I entitled to complain now?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
> 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.
Then there's the Microsoft release cycle:
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Usenet survived the big renaming, despite all the controversy.
Actually the best part about Usenet which is mostly missing today is that the protocol is separate from the client. If you don't like the client you get a different one. This is very similar to email - there's a standard protocol that everyone uses (even microsoft) and then you choose your own client. With Yahoo groups (or google, etc), you have to use their web interface only and if they decide to change it you have to follow along. The drawback of Usenet, which is also one of its big advantages, is that corporations can't monetize it with advertizing and so it lost favor and the completely awful substitute of forums took over.
If only there was an image to go with that....
Someone with Gimp skills doctor up http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/windows-good-and-shit.jpg
how about this?
crap 1-8
crap 1
crap 2
alpha 3.11
crap 95
crap 98
crap NT
crap me
alpha xp
crap me
crap vista
alpha seven
crap 8
alpha 8.1
crap ?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
Then there's the Microsoft release cycle:
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
- Alpha
- Crap
Wrong, it's
- Crap
- Production
- Crap
- Production
- Crap
- Production
- Crap
- Production
- Crap
- Production
You can actually use the two interchangeably, or just replace them both with "Polished Turd" in most cases
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.
I had fun with image leeching recently. With a decent knowledge of .htaccess, you can then remotely modify the stealer's web site. Show whatever content you want even on a per-site basis.
Change is good.
I used to use netscape mail, then left after they lost all my data (fortunately, I set up forwarding to another account)
Then I used yahoo mail, then left after they got overrun with spam and allowed crackers to send emails to my (and my wife's) address books. Also it was a pain to download my mail spool via fetchyahoo.pl .
Now we've been using multiple gmail accounts (one for emailing actual people, and semi-anonymous ones for website registration / bots / mailing lists, that have notification turned off). They also forward mail to my home mail spool, so I'm mostly ready to migrate to the next best thing when necessary.
It's nice that yahoo tries to give the extra little push to help their users find something better, though. I appreciate that!
Though I still prefer to use IRC instead of most social media sites.
Nobody cares.
Because trading a bandwidth problem for an availability problem is brilliant.
Most of their users can't even figure out email that's not web-based.
This.
I want Yahoo groups to die a quick, painless death.
No, I take that back, I want yahoo groups to die s slow, agonizing death that would make purgatory seem like a walk in the park. I just don't have time to savor such a delicious revenge and would rather the idiots who insist on using Yahoo groups go find a better solution.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
You can still bookmark it.
That was only useful in the days before perpetual browser sessions (tabbed browsing brought that about). These days, browser add-ons, OS X Dashboard widgets, and phone home screen widgets have taken that quick-glance role.
Breaking: Slashdot summary doesn't tell the whole story!
News at 11
btw, not trying to be mean, I sympathize with you - I have complained many a-time about summaries - from grammar, to misleading headlines, to outright incorrect summaries (even cases of the headline being contradictory to content in the summary right below it - wtf, is this Gawker??)
That's sort of the point though. Most of Yahoo's properties have been stagnant for years, some even for over a decade.
I've been playing fantasy football on yahoo since 2000. The update is awful, and most of the users hate it. It's added no discernible functionality, but changed a user interface that has been in place for at least ten years. While you can deride users for being 'change resistant', the fact is a consistent, usable interface is a feature.
Lots of times power users, or IT workers don't realize just how offputting a major UI revamp can be. While we get caught up in things like, "Agile", "Features", "Web x.0" most users just want to be left alone.
Really, though, I think this whole "I'm taking my ball and going home" attitude is quite dumb. If you're willing to leave and learn a new platform in protest, why not stay and learn the new upgraded platform where your data already lives?
Users will stay with a platform they know, even if it isn't feature rich. The opportunity cost of switching to another platform is losing the time they've invested in learning the original platform. Once that cost is forced upon them, they might as well investigate other platforms, either out of spite, or simply because they've got to learn something new anyway.
So I'm pretty sure that the only thing keeping me away from running my own site is lack of interest.
I think that about sums it up for me too. I'm glad you got what I was trying to say. Straw indeed. The biggest problem is trying to make your site look good on every screen. As much as I hate FaceBook and refuse to use it, I understand why companies are going with facebook.com/MyCompany. It's at least partially because FaceBook handles the mess of making sure it looks good everywhere. They may not do it exactly the way you want; but you get to outsource all that boring crap to somebody else. I know this is a geek site and we're supposed to find things interesting; but not every technical problem is interesting to everybody. Securing my web site and making it layout properly were not interesting problems for me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It is also possible that they are listening to certain users and not others. I have often found in puzzling situations like this it turns out that there is some demographic or community that gets overriding concern and other ones feel ignored.
so... Obama killed Yahoo! ?
+1 Disagree
How can you consider yourself intelligent and technical when the slightest change in a website turns you into a big crying pussy?
Ego. How can you stay intelligent if the facts keep changing? All your knowledge of Windows 3.11 is mostly useless.
.
So you provide eXpert mode -- they press X and get abbreviated menus. THIS is accomodating all users. Something YahooGroups have given the middle finger to.
I wasted half an hour figuring out how to post in the new YahooGroups. Turns out I can't, in Opera (my preferred browser) or in FireFox. So now I have to send an email instead of online posting. I publish to 6000+ a week and I'm none too happy about the downgrade.
I wonder what would happen if every time a company provided a new interface "upgrade" they also left an option to use the old interface...and they had their product report back to them...and they fired the head of new interface design if it wasn't more popular in a month.
There are extensible interfaces, and then there are douchebags. Yahoo just became the douchebag of the month.
I come here for the love
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
There was more than a skin change. As I said " I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well"
That includes....
This year, we got:
A much better click and move player/team roster. Much better than the old drag and drop system, and better than the classic systems of reordering players.
Detailed Draft Evaluations, with quite a bit of background on how you did and how you can improve next year.
Much easier keeper administration, so much easier on the commish - if you hadn't used this you have no idea how much better it is this year. You can actually see other teams keepers. So much easier to assign players out.
Easier re-invite to bring managers back, even if the manager didn't play last year you can go back and search for all the managers that have ever played for you in prior years and pull back their data. Great way to have league continuity with an individual league record book spanning multiple years.
Much better auction drafting. It actually works like it should this year.
An updated phone app that actually has push notifications and you can both mock draft and live draft from it. This is the first year you can actually do EVERYTHING in the phone app. Quite nice.
Last year:
We got automated recaps. Really nice with a recap of your players performance. I used to spend HOURS creating a weekly email to my league with basically the same data but had to research and crunch those numbers myself. Seriously nice.
Improved league pick 'em - game within a game. We set aside some of our team dues out of the winnings pot and use this side game to wager a little extra money.
Achievements/Medals. Some of my guys think they are really cool and try to unlock them all. I think it's kind of dumb, but whatever. More interactivity and things to brag about. More competition among the league.
Gravatar/League Logomaker support. Much better than only being able to choose a colored helmet.
New stat categories... 4th down stops, tackles for loss, etc. Great to see new buckets available especially for the defense to really balance out the league and make you think even harder on who you'll draft.
None of this cost you a dime. So you can go cry boo-hoo over the new background image and squint at it if you really think it's hard to read, but I'm really happy with how things are progressing over there on this free fantasy platform. The new features far offset the "skin change" or new web design. I love all the new stuff we've gotten. As I said " I'm pretty happy with the work they are doing over there as well"
My company is using Google Apps for business, we pay per user. We don't get any say either. I'm not complaining, since our alternative was Lotus Notes.
You can do a general antileech script pretty easily through mod_rewrite. Just check if the referer is from your own site(s).
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
If it is horrible looking and unusable as Yahoo news and sports then it is not just complainers afraid of change.
It is people upset that they ruined it.
There has been a noticable decline in quality at Yahoo since Marissa Meyer took over. In performance, usablilty, editorial standards, everthing has gone down hill and yahoo was pretty bad in all those areas before she showed up.
In your sig, the term is "intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes".
This has been your Pedantry Of The Day(TM)!
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
Pretty simple to get a business account that allows all the hosting you wish.
I have mine for $69/mo....low level SLA, and they are responsive too.
I dunno why most people don't just pony up a tad more and get a business acct.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's actually the way I dealt with people 'stealing' images. If they can right click and 'copy image URL' they'll do that. So I did a combination of things.
The images are actually a CSS background. And on top of that they're a base64 dataURL. It also makes it trivial to put a watermark on it. I know numerous photographers that use right click disable but that's foiled easy enough or use the CSS background trick but if you read the HTML code that's easy enough to get around. I know a technically savvy person could probably figure it out. But typically people that look at source code get foiled by that.
It's not perfect but for tossing numerous images up on my personal website: http://www.exstatic.org/demo_script/index.php?image=Panorama%200
Keep in mind this also ruins stuff like private browsing. Some browsers don't send a referrer while in in privacy mode.
"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."
To be fair, users bellow over the tiniest of changes to UIs.
I belong to a few Yahoo Groups (my neighborhood group, a cub scout pack group, etc.) and I like the new UI. But a simple solution to deal with the whiners is to make the new UI optional. The new UI can be the default, but users should have the option of switching back to the old interface, at least for a while.
.
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.
Isn't USENET unavailable to the general public? In the 2000 I aways wanted to try it but it was a ten euros per month option at the ISP or a 3rd party provider, and with who knows what filtering and unavailable stuff. I don't know anyone who has ever used it. The paywall is a problem, you can't even access it and see what kind of discussions you can have there. If there are only US users from the 80s/90s that's interesting, but you can already interact with the neckbeards through IRC, slashdot and bug report comments. I don't want to pay 120 euros per year and find out no normal people will ever read my stuff or talk with me.
I'm not interested in binaries (i.e. porn and warez), just the text only stuff.
I was always curious to know how you interact with the stuff, is it really billions of posts stuffed in a single hierarchy?, what's "a" newsgroup, how is it moderated/filtered (I think I heard of a "kill file") and why the paywall when web/irc/mail are free.
I can only surmise they are arrogantly looking down their nose and their user community and scoffing "Stupid cretins, we are gods, do not anger us with your squealing like pigs.
Which is pretty much the same response one gets from Google when you ask them to make a traditional menu bar an option in Chrome.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Usenet survived the big renaming, despite all the controversy.
Actually the best part about Usenet which is mostly missing today is that the protocol is separate from the client. If you don't like the client you get a different one. This is very similar to email - there's a standard protocol that everyone uses (even microsoft) and then you choose your own client. With Yahoo groups (or google, etc), you have to use their web interface only and if they decide to change it you have to follow along. The drawback of Usenet, which is also one of its big advantages, is that corporations can't monetize it with advertizing and so it lost favor and the completely awful substitute of forums took over.
Forums like /., for example. Even today slashdot has a tiny fraction the functionality (and speed) of a high quality USENET newsreader.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
With Yahoo groups (or google, etc), you have to use their web interface only and if they decide to change it you have to follow along.
The few Yahoo groups I use, I use via email as if they were another email list and if messages hadn't started showing up with no line breaks and other weird formatting along with a lot of bitching I'd never have known about the change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Usenet used to fill the niche quite well and wasn't subject to the whims of a single for-profit company.
You said it -- Usenet is not generally profitable. Many ISPs view it as a big cost and others don't provide access. Web forums have largely replaced usenet because they are more profitable.
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?
*whoosh*
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
you can kill leaching at the server level fairly easily. If by leaching you mean people direct linking your images and using all of your bandwidth. Stealing / downloading pics, there is always a way.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/access.html
No. You do not have to use the web interface only. There is an option to receive individual emails and another for digest emails.
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
In your sig, the term is "intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes".
This has been your Pedantry Of The Day(TM)!
I think this entitles you to a big lump of Tungsten-hydroxy-osmium-hydride!
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
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
That's not leeching your images, it's called hot-linking. What they're leeching is your bandwidth, not your images.
Whatever, but if you reread the GP, what you call hot-linking is clearly what he's talking about.
Breakfast served all day!
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"
We are not complaining about Change! We, specially Moderators, are complaining because the changes do not work! We are constantly kicked off the net, we cannot access some groups, we are unable to Edit Calendars or accept new members. This is more than complaining about change! Yahoo has forced Group Members to give up, many setting up Closed Groups on Facebook.