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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 //