DARnet

Interesting issues around migrating ‘voluntary’ or non-formal communities. A few years ago I was a member of a community using online software that were taken over by Yahoogroups. The resentment caused by this ‘forced change’ was immense. Personally I felt disempowered and alienated as we were forced to move resulting in a different URL/services, etc. if we wished to continue with our community.

The issues you face are not exactly the same, but there are parallels and it will be interesting to see if at the point of change you lose members for some of the reasons I have indicated above as for some this will be in effect a

I’m also familiar with the enforced takeover. One of the groups started out 5 years ago on onelist.com
They got taken over by egroups, and then in turn by yahoogroups, after which there were no real alternatives available except providing your own majordomo type listserv or using a web based community such as msngroups. Then the yahoogroups service started to deteriorate. So the new google service, however patchy, is welcome indeed.

I did some research across a range of communities for report2 term1 which indicated that key people have a strong loyalty to online communities, they value them most for the people who are in them, and would prefer to stick with whatever software/medium is in use.
http://www.frankieroberto.com/dad/ultrastudents/andyroberts/term1/report2.html#survey

Oh, and my post on this subject to the onlinefacilitators’ group has now been moderator approved, so maybe there’ll be some input from there.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onlinefacilitation/message/7031

As I remeber it Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia did some resrach and theorizing around the concept of weak and strong ties in communities. The upshot was if there are strong ties then people will go to considerable efforts to overcome difficulties or obstacles. Obvious in a way, but it is a useful angle when considering how much disruption a community might be able to withstand.

Developments yesterday:

At last googlegroups approved my list of invitations to join the trial group. They had auto blocked me from doing these because of the numbers involved, ( fair enough, I might have been a spammer, giving their new service a bad name). So then one of the bouncing members, Vicky, was confused by my invitation to to join the trial group and managed to resubscribe to the original group in order to ask whether the invitation was bona-fide, ( wary that it may have come from some rival trying to poach members). So that was the end of my attempt to do a quiet trial without disturbing the main group! Of course I explained why I felt it was necessary to investigate alternatives to yahoogroups, and the problems we have been getting with members being excluded because of bouncing email addresses, amongst other things.

This has resulted in one reply which kind of confirms what I’ve suspected about the anti-spam software being installed on some mail servers. I had this problem myself a while back, mailed my ISP admin and they switched off one of the rules.

“Andy - I wish you luck here, as I’m not so sure that you’ll be fully succesfull in your aim. Bounced mails are typically caused by the email group members ISP anti-spam measures. Some of the software that is used is quite fancy, and operates according to various sorts of pattern recognition algorithms, and what is worse it’s actions are often totally hidden from the user (the group member). The first that someone knows about the problem is either the “missing regular email flow” or when one is informed that one’s account or group membership is being blocked because of too many bounces.

So it’s not just Andy that needs to look at doing something here, but all members (e.g. Vicky) who are having this problem need to review what anti-spam measures their ISP has in force and if these are not open to user administration, then the logical conclusions is to find a new ISP (when using POP3 or IMAP email), or a new web based email provider. It can help to raise the issue with the ISP in question, although this can be a somewhat tedious process.

I did a bit of fishing around (professional investigation!) on Vicky’s ISP and as part of Demon’s email configuration options you can set their anti-spam filter to be active or not (details are under “Help Desk”). I would advise Vicky to set this to be inactive, at least in the short term. If any of this is not clear, then feel free to email me directly.
Regards, Mike”

One of the things that makes me believe it’s as much yahoogroups fault as the ISPs is that among the list of bouncing members are many with yahoo email addresses.

So yahoo mail have been bouncing messages from yahoogroups, and then yahoogroups have been cutting them off!

Ggroups, ready or not here we come.

So here’s a critical incident arising from copying a membership list over to googlegroups

N writes:
“How do I get out of this group that I was signed up for without being asked? I have no interest in anything you are discussing and am no longer a Student! It would have been nice to have been ask to opt in. ”

My reply :

Hi N,
I’m sorry that you left the course and that you have been bothered by unwanted emails. They arrived because you signed up to U@yahoogroups which has now moved over to @googlegroups. When memberships were transferred there wasn’t an obvious way to set each indivual preference for receiving mails as individual mail, digest or web only so you ended up set to individual mail by default . This has
now been rectified, sorry again.

If any members wish to change their preferences or unsubscribe you can do so by visiting the groups page at
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/……
Hope that helps,
Thanks for the learning opportunity,

Andy

Another problem which has been pointed out in two groups so far is the absence of a clear Tag name in the subject header of the emails like [COMFAC] . This makes it harder for people to organise their inboxes and archives.
I surmised that this may possibly be a deliberate ommission on Google’s part, perhaps to reduce the chances of erroneously triggering spam detection software, but it could just be that they haven’t got round to it yet.

I started a new google groups list today, then decided to switch to my work email address because it is more reliable. I ended up loosing control of my group. I then made a new account with my other email address and regained control of my group. I emailed them to suggest that your groups should move with you when you change your email address, but that was just minutes ago, so I have not heard anything back from them. Hopefully when this moves into production email address changes wont screw up list membership.

ukcider:
300 email addresses added in to the new googlegroup last night, now the odd requests to unsubscribe are being sent and one member has posted a useful guide to registration

Thread here:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/ukcider/browse_thread/thread/6da2e5fb5864c8b4/f482111089102887?_done=%2F%3F&_doneTitle=Back+to+overview&#f482111089102887

new problems discovered:

Subscribers list on GG can only be accessed by clicking ‘next’ through the pages - jump to initial letter required.

membership count on the home page is hopelessly innacurate

I spotted that subject tagging is now enabled in GoogleGroupsbeta.

Go to Manage Group, and then edit the “Posting and delivery” prefs - e.g. prefix [ultrastudents]

This will make message filtering easier.

Nightmare!!

I expected a few “please unsubscribe me” messages from members who forgot they ever signed up to the yahoogroup in the first place, and this was already dying down, with only about 12 people dropping out. So I started an on topic thread to get things going normally again.

And then it happened

GoogleGroupsBeta suddenly started misbehaving badly, by relaying the same emails multiple times and delaying the arrival of those messages by hours and days. This suggests serious problems with the GGB mail server which haven’t been resolved quickly.

So now I’m getting people writing “why am I getting all these messages repeated?” and then receiving those same complaints lots of times in a dreadful feedback loop.

So I’ve switched on moderation in order to cut it off, but some old messages from before the switch are still coming through. And I’m getting lots of auto-requests to approve/deny the same new messages.

I’ve left the ultrastudents list unmoderated, as they are not such a volatile crowd and seem to be dealing with it better than the orchardists.

Investigating the problem, it took me a while to find a help forum but in the end I found the link in Google Labs. Here’s the tinyurl direct to a thread in which other groups owners are documenting the same problem:

http://tinyurl.com/2whrh

( While i was there i had a quick look at google sets - interesting. )

How can I keep members informed when sending any mail to groups exacerbates the problem?

With hindsight, I should have told people to keep an eye on the ukcider website or blog for news.

I found the forum for discussing and reporting googlegroups2 problems and suggestions.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google-labs-groups2

As a result, I’m pleased to say I was contacted by an employee of google and asked to supply copies of the repeating emails with full headers for them to investigate. It now appears the problem is solved, although there are still a few old emails from last week winging around and around.

I tried to keep ukcider members informed of the situation through posting updates at http://www.ukcider.co.uk