Yahoo Groups

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Now you can start searching conversations and photos quickly, using the convenient floating search icon. The search icon appears toward the bottom of the page once you scroll, adjacent to the “Back to top” icon. Click the search icon and enter your query to start searching instantly.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Finding your contributions to your Yahoo Group just became easier.

While browsing the photo stream or albums, you can filter the list to see only “My photos.”

From the messages page, you can view only messages you've posted by clicking on 'Actions' and choosing 'My Messages' from the drop down menu.

When searching for messages in your Group, you can filter the message search results to show only messages you’ve posted.

When reading a message you can now see more messages from the same author easily. Just click the “see more posts from” link at the bottom of the message. 

We also showcase recent posts by the same author in the “Read more” section on the right rail.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

With new improvement to the Group Search experience, finding the right Yahoo Group to join is now easier.. The search algorithm has been fine tuned to surface relevant Groups with the highest recent activity. We’ve also updated the Browse Groups experience to feature active groups by category.

If you are a Group owner or moderator, we recommend that you update your Group title and description to describe what your Yahoo Group is about. This will improve the discovery of your Group by users looking for Groups like yours.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

We heard your feedback on the ability to include first name and last name in members list. The first name and last name where available, will also be shown in the members list in addition to the Yahoo alias of each member.

As a moderator, you can sort the members list by first name last name or by the Yahoo alias of the members.

Yahoo Groups will start including the name provided by the member on the Yahoo profile page for the member.

When inviting new members to your Yahoo Group, first name and last name can be included along with email address. Invited members of the group can change it when joining the group.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

We’ve tried to make using poll questions and soliciting responses from your group a lot easier.

You can now include a poll question in your message. Members of your group will be able to see it when they read the message, then they can respond to the poll question on the web and email.

Members can even add their own voting options to the poll question you added, or they can reply with a new poll question. All poll questions that are part of the same topic are shown on the right rail when viewing the message thread.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

We heard your feedback on the default sort and view settings for conversations, photos and files. You can now select your own default settings!

Here’s how…

From the navigation bar, choose ‘Membership’ and then the ‘Edit membership’ option

You’ll notice the ‘Sort & View Preferences’ section where you can see and set your default preferences by clicking the edit icon.

You can also control your navigation preferences for conversations and Photos. For example, you can set your default navigation for Photos to be “Albums” instead of “Photostream”

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups users often send out polls to gather votes on questions that are being discussed. You can now add your own voting option to an existing poll question.

And that’s not all. Now when you see a Group poll notification via email, you can see the poll question and voting options and click to vote or click on “Add Options” to add you own.

Members get notified via email when a voting option is added by any member.

Many of our users are always looking for interesting new Groups to join. We now automatically show some Groups, that members of your current Group have joined.  'Members of this group also joined' is not always shown, but is based on subscription patterns.

Like what you see ? simply click on the Group shown, check out their info page and click “Join Group”. 

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Photo sharing is a popular activity with many Yahoo Groups. We recently blogged about our new automatic photo albums. Today, we’re happy to launch timeline view and map view for photos shared with the Group. 

  In the timeline view, photos are grouped together based on the date the photo was captured and displayed by time slice, such as “Earlier this year,” “In the year 2013,” etc.

In the map view, geotagged photos are displayed on the map. You can scroll through all the photos from a city on the photo carousel.

Please note that these new views include  only photos with EXIF data. To see all photos in an album you can switch back to list view. If you’d like to know more about sharing photo locations with Yahoo Groups, check out our earlier post about privacy controls for photo location sharing.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Sharing photos with your Yahoo Group just got a lot easier with new automatic photo albums. When you send mail to the Group with photos attached, an album with those photos is automatically created and titled with the subject line of the email. When other members reply to the same topic with more photos attached, these are also automatically added to the album.

All of your automatically created photo albums can be found in the “Photomatic” tab under the “Photos” section.

Moderators can enable or disable the display of these automatic albums to Group members via the Group settings tab in the Control Panel. For members, editing the album and adding photos through the Photomatic web experience is the same as working with regular photo albums in Groups.

When a new automatic album is created or when photos are added, Group members will be notified through Group message email notifications with a link to the album.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

We heard your feedback related to deliverability of mails sent to your Group Owner email address. We have improved how these messages are processed, and if you’re a Group owner, you may have already noticed these improvements.

Some email clients do not honor the ‘Reply-To’ email header, consequently, replies to some messages were going to the Group instead of to the sender. To address this issue, we changed the email ‘From’ header to [email protected] for emails sent to non-group addresses.

Since the ‘From’ address has been changed to the Groups email address as part of the DMARC-related changes, we’ve also added the text “Posted by username <email address>” at the bottom of every message to clarify who the sender is.

Also, when you compose a reply in the Groups web experience, if you choose to modify the “To“ or “From” address, you can see where the reply to the post will be sent.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Many photos captured using smartphones typically include the time of photo capture and the location where the photo was taken. This information is stored as part of the photo file in a standard format known as EXIF.

We’ve rolled out three enhancements in this regard:

When any Yahoo Group member downloads a photo shared with the Group, the original is downloaded without the EXIF data. This applies to all photos with EXIF data stored in a Yahoo Group. The only exception is when the owner of the photo downloads it.

You now have a setting to control whether or not to share photo locations with the Group. Just visit your membership settings page to switch photo location sharing ON or OFF.

You can also override the setting for specific sets of photos while uploading.

Following the recent changes in Yahoo DMARC policy to protect users from email spam, we’ve made changes to how Yahoo Groups sends mails to members’ inboxes.

When a member of a Yahoo Group replies to a post, mails are sent by Yahoo Groups on behalf of the user. The message is sent with the “From” email address as <groupname>@yahoogroups.com, and the display name in “From” would contain the email address of the sender and the name of the Yahoo Group.

Message sent by Yahoo Groups on behalf of the user used to appear as:

From: “My Name” <my_user_name@my_email_domain.com>

With the change, it would be:

From: “ ‘My Name' my_user_name@my_email_domain.com [groupname]” <[email protected]>

When replying to a Group message, Group “Reply-To” settings of the Group will continue to be honored on the Reply compose screen on the web and in your email service.

On the web experience, if you choose a “To” address other than reply to the group, like ‘reply to sender’ or ‘reply to group owner’ (using the drop-down menu), the “Reply to” mail address would be changed appropriately.

For example, if you choose to ‘reply to the sender,’ replies to your email will be delivered to your actual email address, even though the “From” address of your reply will have:

“ ‘My Name’ my_user_name@my_email_domain.com [groupname]” <[email protected]>

With these changes we are addressing deliverability issues due to DMARC adoption by mail service providers.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

We are excited to announce that plain blue links are becoming a thing of the past as we’re introducing link preview in Yahoo Groups. When composing a message on Yahoo Groups, if you paste a link from the internet, you will now see an instant preview of the content from that URL. The preview includes an image and short snippet from that web page.

As in Yahoo Mail, link preview works for articles, images and videos and is available in two sizes. You can also delete the preview card by clicking the 'x' icon in the top right corner of the card.

To try it out, simply paste the link to the article, photo or video you wish to share in the message  you are composing in the Groups web experience and you will see a link preview appear. The recipient can see the link preview both in the email notification as well as the Message read experience on the Groups website.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Beginning today, we’re making it possible for moderators to send mail to a pending member.

To get started, click the newly introduced ‘reply’ icon in the pending member page to launch the message compose window. The pending member will receive the message from the group owner’s email address. With this enhancement, Group moderators can ask pending members questions or provide information before making an approval decision.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

Conversations in Yahoo Groups can become quite long when some messages in the topic are posted with attachments. Now, when you view a topic, Yahoo Groups surfaces the attachments in the topic automatically. All attachments are tabulated beside the topic with the most recent ones visible on top.

You can see all attachments in the topic, preview photo attachments instantly and download files attached to messages in the topic.

By Aravind Sampathkumaran, Product Leader, Yahoo Groups

When viewing a topic, some of our users wanted the ability to open a specific message independently and share the message url. We’re now introducing the ability to do just that on the message tiles.

The subject line of a message or the discussion topic is now shown below the toolbar to allow more of the subject text to be displayed.

  When reading a message which is part of a topic with many posts, you can now see the number of messages in addition to the link where you can view all the messages in the conversation.

Enhancements for Groups moderators

Some of our moderators reported an issue involving the truncation of a comment submitted by pending member. This has now been resolved.

In addition, many of our moderators requested the option to set their groups to ‘plain text’ mode, we're rolling this out progressively. Please go to ‘Management >> Group settings’ to see expanded options that now include plain text.

  We hope you find these updates to be useful.