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As a moderator of a few yahoogroup forums I get frequent requests for me to remove members, update their email addresses, change their email notifications and so on.  Realistically I couldn’t do this for everyone – with over 2,000 participants in the forums I moderate (or own) it would become a fulltime job in itself – an unpaid one.  I try to educate them periodically on things they can do to help themselves, but it seems that sometimes it still doesn’t click – especially if they’ve not participated in online forums before.

Below is an email I sent to one of my groups explaining how their membership works and I’ve added it here to assist anyone else trying to learn how it can work for them.

Everyone owns their own account at yahoogroups.com.  If I subscribed you because you belong to the ACS team, you would have received a welcome message via yahoogroups explaining how it works.  Some groups (like mine) might have a series of emails that come through, to explain how the list works and possibly send some files as well.

To login to yahoogroups.com, use the email address you were registered with, or the one you are receiving at and enter your password. If you do not know your password, then you need to click on ‘forgot password’ so yahoogroups can regenerate that for you – your moderator cannot do it.  If that doesn’t work for you they can log in and ask it to regenerate and I have done this on occasions for some and that usually resolves it.  If you don’t receive the information you need then you do need to contact yahoogroups at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html

At the bottom of every email you’ll find links to Visit Your Group, Change Settings via the Web, or Unsubscribe.

Once you have logged in, you’ll see a blue box on the left that says ‘View Groups‘ and to the right of that ‘Edit My Groups’ (see figure below).  Click on Edit My Groups and then change your settings from Individual emails to nomail, daily digest or whatever suits you.  You’ll need to do this for each group you belong to but if the setting is to be the same for all you can do it simply in one hit rather than individually for each group from this screen.  For the moderator to do it they have to login as a moderator and then search through each group to find you and this does take time.  At the centre of the screen you’ll see a link for ‘Go to my Email Preferences’ which is where you can add more email addresses or change them.  You can have several addresses listed to send from but you can only choose one to receive at.  I have about 6 or 7 addresses listed on my yahoogroups account and might have a different address listed for receiving for each forum I belong to.

It really is important for you to become familiar with anything you use on the web.  I belong to 20 groups here at yahoogroups and some are set to nomail and some to individual email.  I wouldn’t expect the moderators of those groups to manage my account for me and it’s important that you don’t either.  So please take the time to explore how yahoogroups works and you’ll find that you can easily make changes and even join more groups if you wish.

Finally, if you are going on leave for a period of time, set your yahoogroups to ‘nomail’ so that your autoresponder does not keep coming back to the moderators. It is really very annoying for every message that is posted to receive an autoresponder advising you’re not available.

I hope this helps everyone to understand a little more about how yahoogroups works.

Tags: Forums, Yahoogroups by Kathie Thomas
5 Comments »

I belong to many groups at yahoogroups (over 20) but I wonder how many out there really don’t know much about them?  I thought I’d do a series on ‘How To Use Yahoogroups’.

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
1 Comment »

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
4 Comments »

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
6 Comments »