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.'"

Re:Lesson not learned

[jaymz666]

Why are there so few alternatives? Because egroups and onelist merged and yahoo bought them

In other news...

[pla]

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...

Re:Lesson not learned

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Lesson not learned

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Lesson not learned

[PCM2]

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.

Re:Is this news?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yahoo only has crazy dog lovers groups left. Check out the complaint.

"The home page is gone. People join my group to get photos of their dogs edited and honored by being posted on the group home page which is now GONE! Only ONE of the photos can be seen at ALL."

So these are the ones that complain...

While there are also other valid complaints, those are being fixed. I've used Yahoo groups and the past and it really kind of sucked. Glad to see they are working on it.

Re:In other news...

[Dan667]

I totally hate the gmail change. It makes no sense to make composing an email in a totally different interface than the one for replying to an email. And the compose window is awkward to enter text into. I have no idea what they were trying to accomplish, but I would dump it in an instant if I could find the checkbox (and I have looked ... repeatedly).

Where is the tech coverage?

[Buzz K]

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?

Re:Change is hard

[Above]

All the people who only used the e-mail side of it just got their accounts deleted for "inactivity" since they never logged into Yahoo!, and thus never saw ads or otherwise generated revenue.

Group membership is dropping like a log with their effort to reclaim addresses.

Re:Lesson not learned

[HiThere]

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.

Re:Lesson not learned

[istartedi]

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?

Re:Lesson not learned

[iczerjones]

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.