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I belong to many groups at yahoogroups (over 20) but I wonder how many out there really don’t know much about them?

I moderate several groups and own about 4 myself with a total number of well over 2,000 participants.  And another group I belong to has over 8,000 members on its own.

There are tens of thousands of groups there - on almost any topic you can think of.  In the moderator’s group alone there are over 43,000 members and I expect there are a lot of moderators who aren’t members of that group - I only recently joined myself.

Anyone can start up a group but it would be worth your while first to do a search to see if there are already existing groups in the topic of interest.    I’ll give you some tips here to help you find an active group.

1. First, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/ and do a search on your topic of interest.
2. I decided to search on Embroidery and you’ll see there are over 2,000 groups with this word in their description.
3. Next, look at the description. Under the name of the forum it will list the number of members and indicate if membership is required - most groups will need you to join simply because spammers can run rife in publicly open groups. A large membership list though might not indicate a very active group.
4. Click on the link for that group to view their home page. If you look at the Figure 1 below, this shows the number of messages sent each month for a list with over 3,000 members.  I wouldn’t call that very active.  If you look at figure 2 the list has just under 900 members but look at the number of messages per month.  If you’re really looking to connect with others in your topic of interest and learn from them, then an active group is what you’re looking for - not necessarily the largest.
5. Next, read through their home page message - if you can abide by their rules or think they sound like a good group to join, then click on the ‘Join This Group’ link. Some groups will accept you straight away, others will be moderated and you’ll have to wait for your application to be approved.  Make sure you give a description or reason if asked to do so - don’t leave that section blank otherwise your request to join may get ignored as a potential spammer.
6. Once you are accepted as a member, make sure you read any further rules or information sent to you and view the archived messages.  In other words ‘lurk’ for a week or two, just to get a feel for the culture of the group and to make sure you don’t embarrass yourself by breaking any ‘unwritten’ rules.  And only self-promote if encouraged to do so, otherwise, once again, you might get branded a spammer.
7. Finally - participate. Ask questions, answer questions, join in the chatter and let other members get to know you.  If you have good knowledge on the topic at hand it will be noticed and it won’t be long before you’ll be welcomed as someone who really knows what they’re talking about. Have fun!

Figure 1

Figure 2

On my next post I’ll explain about setting up your personal membership of a group or groups and then will follow up with starting up your own group.

yahoogroups, forums, chat groups, membership groups

Tags: Yahoogroups by Kathie Thomas
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It happened! The unimaginable!  I’d been creating new blogs in Wordpress 2.6 and slowly getting used to the new look and Dashboard changes and thought I would upgrade some of my blogs to this new version. I did a couple and they worked well so I decided to upgrade this one too.  That’s when it happened.  My categories went missing!  And I didn’t know how to get them back again.

They weren’t showing in the menu sidebar - just an empty spot and when I logged into the Dashboard and viewed the Categories list, there were rows of empty tickboxes with no names and a number at the end of each line indicating the number of posts for that invisible category listing.

Searches at Wordpress Support didn’t come up with any answers for me, although many were asking for help on the same thing, but Googling did produce some results with some step-by-steps on how to fix the problem.  But there were steps missing!  The first part was relatively easy and I was able to successfully make changes inside phpMyAdmin and get the categories list showing but there was no explanation on how to link the tables back up (perhaps that knowledge was assumed by the writers) and since I’ve never done it before I was not going to attempt something with no clear instructions on what to do next.

They also assumed that you had a backup file you could use to find out what all your categories were - wrong!  Mine isn’t writeable to the directory so I have xml files I have exported and can import but don’t have a back up file to refer to.  I must fix that issue one day too!

However, I discovered a really easy way of doing it in Wordpress, and thought I’d share it here for those who are not game to fiddle with the database on their server.

I did a manual fix.

1. After thinking about this a great deal I decided to create a new category to see what would happen.  It showed - that was good.
2. So I placed one of my posts with that and that worked.
3. Then I ticked all the other blank categories listed and clicked on the delete button. Everything automatically defaulted to ‘uncategorised’ which was still showing as blank (and is not removeable) but I knew that the first listing there was the uncategorised list.
4. After that I recreated my categories and reconnected everything - there were 118 posts so that wasn’t too bad and only took me 2-3 hours to do.

The good thing about this was I got to rethink all the categories I have listed here and reconnected some posts to belong to more than one category so in effect, my blog got tidied up in the process.

So, if you are too scared to touch the real techy side of your blog and want a fix that you can do, without calling in help, the above should work for you - it did for me!

missing categories, categories invisible, Wordpress 2.6

Tags: About Blogging, Technology, Wordpress by Kathie Thomas
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Last week one of my clients contacted me as they’d been approached from a company in China who was ‘concerned that a domain’ similar to my client’s was going to be registered by another business.  As soon as she asked me about it I had a feeling that it was most likely either spam or a scam.  Sure enough, once she sent me a copy of the email I was positive it was a scam, however I encouraged her to seek advice from a govt dept here in Australia just to be sure.

Today I received three of these same emails - each for a different domain I own - and all along the same lines. My suspicions have been more than confirmed and just to take it further I decided to do some searches of my own online.

Below are links to just three sites warning of this scam and there are many more too.

How scammers trick you out of your domain name (1)

How scammers trick you out of your domain name (2)

Net in China domain spam

Domain scammers list

If in doubt, always best to seek advice (as my client had sought to do) and doing a search on Google or your otherwise favourite search engine is a good thing to do.  I usually copy and paste a key phrase from the email and place it into the search engine to see if anything comes up.  Sure enough, it did!

domain scam, domain name, scammers, China

Tags: Warnings by Kathie Thomas
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It keeps coming doesn’t it?  It seems someone must come up with a ‘fantastic’ idea of how to scam people out of their hard-earned money and then others pick it up too.  A wave of emails with the same topic but different send from addresses.

For awhile it was job offers to Virtual Assistants, last week it was VA Certification applications and this week it appears to be bookings for airline tickets.  Or should I say ‘Your Flight Ticket Nxxx’.  To date I have received several of these from different airlines - I mean how many flights did I book recently? Ummm, none that I recall.

For the uninitiated or those very green to the Internet, they may well take these emails as genuine and for those who have been around awhile they might be a tad wary, whereas the rest of us, just hit delete and move onto the next email.

If you are in doubt about the genuineness of an email and you don’t know the sender personally, then I encourage you to Google the subject of the email - if it’s spam or a scam, you’ll soon find references to it.  And if it doesn’t come up, then possibly it’s worth checking with someone you know who is more internet savvy than you, like your ISP or webhost for example.  And even if it was sent to you by someone you know well - always worth checking anyway.  They might have been infected by a virus or trojan and are unaware the email came from their address at all.

Tags: Warnings by Kathie Thomas
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I had a meeting with a business acquaintance at the Melbourne Airport this morning.  This man originally made contact with me December 2005 on an off chance that my Virtual Assistant team in Australia might be able to assist his business in the UK.  At that time I was only a few weeks away from travelling to the UK for the first time and I asked him where he was. The answer was London and when I told him I was flying in there the following February (2006) he offered to come with his wife and meet my husband and me and take us to lunch.

That started an email business relationship that is slowly growing over time. We have connected via LinkedIn, post about each other periodically on blogs (and here I am, doing it again) and the business we discussed this morning means we’ll be working more closely together very soon.  What he has been developing since we first met has some exciting promises for my industry and for small business people in general.

You hear often about the ‘hunters and gatherers’ who collect email contacts or business cards at networking events, but then there are the ‘farmers’ too, who sow seeds, nurture, water and feed, and over time grow a harvest that is later ready for reaping.

There is value in building relationships and spending time waiting for the right time. True, you might be able to turn around some quick business bucks by grabbing cards and making follow up contact, but often it’s not till people really get an understanding of who you are and an appreciation for your experience and knowledge that longer-term benefits begin to show.  So it’s important to maintain contact without making a nuisance of yourself - no hard sells, but regular contact through newsletters, occasional emails and catching up with each other whenever someone is in town.  You never know what’s going on in the lives of others and maintaining contact, even if casual, can often reap a harvest at the most unexpected times.

Tags: Networking by Kathie Thomas
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