Marla Cilley, known to her followers as the FlyLady , has grown into a Yahoo! phenomenon. With the largest group on Yahoo! Groups, FlyLadyMentors , the FlyLady has recently reached a never-before-seen milestone of 500,000 members worldwide who come to her for advice on how to improve their lives using her celebrated ‘FLY’ (finally love yourself) philosophy. FLY encourages people to declutter their homes as a physical metaphor to help them uncover happiness and beauty in their lives

"I challenge everyone to throw away their dreams of perfection and just get things done,” said Cilley. “My Yahoo! Group is a wonderful outlet to touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of people everyday, and in return I receive the gift of thanks from those whose lives have dramatically changed for the better."

In celebration of reaching the 500,000-member mark and the success of the FlyLadyMentors group on Yahoo!, Marla hosted a milestone event on October 4^th in Dallas, Texas. Several hundred members from across the nation flew in to meet the FlyLady.

Below is a four minute video that re-caps the highlights from this event, enjoy!

“They (other HR professionals) told me not to do it! I went ahead and took up the challenge,” says Raghav and adds with a smile, “I formed my Yahoo! Group - HR in India .” The group achieved success within 5 years of its launch by becoming India’s biggest HR Network. To read the complete story visit Yahoo! Groups India Blog.

Update 11/20/08 1:13 PM PST): In case any you fee like you are seeing things, the Groups Labs/Grouplets link in the left hand navigation did indeed re-appear for a couple days this week and then disappear again. We will fully restore this link the week after Thanksgiving. Thank you for your continued patience.

Because of some technical issues, we have had to again roll back the recent release that included the Groups Labs/Grouplets link in the left hand navigation.

However, if your group had already begun to use grouplets, don’t worry; your grouplets are still there, and you and your members can still access them through this direct link:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/YOUR_GROUP_NAME/grouplets/subscriptions

(NOTE: you’ll need to replace "YOUR_GROUP_NAME" with the actual name of your group.)

We hope to have the left hand navigation links restored soon.

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE (11/12/2008: 1:00 pm PST): We’ve just pushed an update to the new photos system that fixes the album sort problem (alphabetical is again the default sort for albums, and it is again an "a-z" sort).

We also think this push should help address the issues dial-up users were having when when trying to upload (the 103 error).  So please let Customer Care know if you are still having problems uploading:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/general.html

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Just wanted to alert moderators to some bugs that may be affecting your groups and users.

YMail/Rocketmail Users Join/Create Problem

For a complicated set of reasons that has to do with the way Yahoo’s registration system interacts with the Groups membership systems, users who create Yahoo! ID’s and choose the Ymail or Rocketmail domains (rather than yahoo.com) may have trouble joining groups (via the "Join This Group" button on group home pages) or starting groups. These users may get caught in an endless loop when asked to create a profile.

If anyone you know is caught in this loop, they can get out of it by first creating an "alias" in this way:

Go to: https://edit.yahoo.com/identity/manage
Click "Add Alias" and enter your desired Alias in the box provided and click "Save" directly to the right. If the Alias you want is available, it will then appear automatically as an Alias. If the Alias is already in use, you’ll receive a message that says "This alias is not available. Please try entering another."
(Note: The Profiles Blog has some useful tutorials on this if you want visual instructions).

Once they have successfully created an alias, the user should have no trouble either starting a group or joining one.

———-

New Photos Issues

More and more groups have been migrated to the new Photos system with the 100 gigabytes of storage (rather than the old 100 megabytes).

However, there are (at least) two bugs that groups and users of the new system may encounter:

1. Albums are being arranged differently by default. Rather than being arranged alphabetically, albums are current defaulted into being ordered by creation date (with the more recently created albums first). In addition, even when you click the "title" link to rearrange albums alphabetically, they are sorting "z to a" rather than "a to z".

We’re going to fix this bug (hopefully as early as this coming week), restoring alphabetical to the default sort (and to making it an "a to z" sort).
(Note: In the mean time, however, you can still get the albums in alphabetical order by switching to "list" view (rather than thumbnail) and sorting by "album name". If you then return to thumbnail view, the albums will keep the same sort you had in list view.)

2. Some dial-up users in groups that have been migrated are reporting problems uploading photos (frequently getting "103 errors"). We’re still working to resolve this issue.

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(Note: If you have problems that are not addressed by the explanation below, or if you are experiencing other bugs, please report them to Customer Care (rather than commenting on the blog) :
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html
(or look for help from fellow users: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/ideas/index.html )

While we read all comments posted to blog, we will NOT be able to provide any individual assistance to users who post comments. Customer Care is the only place to go for individual assistance.)

UPDATE (11/11 12:40 pm PST) : After being rolled back last week, the release is now being pushed out again and the links should be live again on all group home pages view within the next few hours.

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You may have already noticed the new "Groups Labs" heading and "Grouplets" link in the left hand navigation of all groups.

Groups Labs is a new area of Yahoo! Groups where we can test out new features before fully incorporating them into groups.

Grouplets, our first Groups Labs release, are new kinds of applications within Yahoo! Groups that allow owners and moderators to create and customize applications specifically for the needs of their group. Currently, we are offering eight types of grouplet templates (Address Book, Birthday List, Favorites, For Sale, Give Away, Group Profile, Jobs, and Places Map) and the ability to add as many different grouplets to your group as you like (though you always have to start from one of these templates).

You can learn more about Grouplets from this earlier blog post and from our Groups Labs Help Page .

We would love groups and users to try out these features and to tell us what you think. To provide feedback, send email to groupslabs@yahoogroups.com (or join the Groups Lab group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/groupslabs if you want to participate in an ongoing discussion).

However, please keep in mind that the features within Groups Labs are all "Beta" features, and they are more likely (compared to standard Yahoo! Groups features) to have usability issues, to be down at times for maintenance, or even to be removed altogether if it turns out there is no interest in them or significant technical problems.

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Update: Two additional points:

- The Groups Labs heading and Grouplets link cannot be removed from the navigation and display to all members.

- However, only a moderator can add grouplets to a group. And if no grouplets have been added, when a member clicks on the "Grouplets" link, they will simply see a message that "Your group has not enabled any Grouplets"

You do so much for your community.
We’d like to give something back.

Save your seat for the Yahoo! Groups Moderator Town Hall

————————

Join Yahoo! Groups for a special evening, just for moderators, where you can:

- Hear the latest Yahoo! Groups news.

- Exchange ideas with other moderators.

- Participate in a panel discussion with the Yahoo! Groups team.

- Enjoy complimentary food and beverages.

————————

Yahoo! Groups Town Hall — New York City

- Grand Hyatt New York
- Tuesday, November 18
- 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Click here to register now

Update: Apologies for the belated notice, but this problem was actually fixed Monday (11/3) afternoon (PST)

We’re aware of the issue affecting some groups with recent activity (including pending messages) not appearing on the group home page. We are currently working to identify the root cause of the problem and to address the issue. We appreciate your patience. Thank you,

- The Yahoo! Groups Team

My name is Melissa and I’m the Community Manager for the profiles team and work with Jami, the Groups Community Manager.

Jami mentioned that many of you have had questions about the new profiles system and I wanted to share an update with you all.

We appreciate all your feedback and comments and have been working hard over the past week to make a few changes to improve your profiles experience.

We understand that some of you miss the old profile; however, Yahoo! is committed to build upon this new profile and we hope you will send us your suggestions to make it even better.

Now to the changes we’ve already made. Some of you may have noticed that while perusing your friend’s profiles you previously came across empty profiles, making it difficult for you to learn more about a specific user. We’ve repopulated ALL of the profiles (whether they’ve logged into the new system or not) with the information that a user had previously entered, and set anything that was public before, back to public. This includes display images and limited profile information and details.

What this means for you, as a user, is that now when you’re in a Yahoo! Group or a chat room, you’ll be able to learn a little more about the user you’re talking to, whether they’ve updated their profile or not.

In addition to this, we’ve also updated some of the error messages you were seeing to alleviate some of the confusion. Before, if you searched for your own ID before you migrated over to the new profiles system , you saw a blank profile. Now, you’ll be taken right into the new profiles system and will have the opportunity to update your information right there.

If you come across an alias that hasn’t been linked to a main ID, you’ll be told “This user has chosen not to link this Alias with their profile on Yahoo! in order to maintain their privacy.”

We also heard from you that linking aliases wasn’t clearly explained, so we’ve updated the text to do a better job of explaining what’s going on, and how to make yourself (and your aliases) discoverable.

You all have been incredibly patient and we appreciate all of the feedback you’ve provided us over the past few weeks. We know that there are several other improvements you all would like to see, and we’re working hard to incorporate them into the new profiles system.

For more information on the changes to profiles, please visit the profiles news blog .

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager

We would like your input on potentially modifying or removing the Guideline prohibiting the use of Yahoo! Groups for commercial or advertising purposes . Our original goal in establishing the Guideline against commercial use was primarily to prevent spammers from using Yahoo! Groups. We still intend to strongly enforce this prohibition but believe that the broad prohibition on no commercial or advertising use of Groups may not be the best approach. We have not made any final decisions and would need to figure out how it would work, but we wanted to get your input as we consider potential alternatives.

Here are the two changes we are considering:

POSSIBLE CHANGE #1: Removing Guideline # 6 (The ban against using Groups for commercial or advertising purposes).

POSSIBLE CHANGE #2: Adding a line to Guideline # 4 (Stay on topic) to let group owners know that if they post off topic commercial messages they may run the risk that it is considered spam, which is not allowed.

What do you all think of this proposal, do you have any concerns? Please share with us by posting in the comments area below.

Thanks!
Yahoo! Groups Team

Big thanks to everyone for posting all of the great input and suggestions on the new Abandoned Groups Guideline we’re developing.

Next steps are for us to continue making our way through all of the comments you left and incorporating our thoughts, then drafting the post. Once we have the internal sign-off, we’ll share the new Guideline with all of you.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on how best to resolve this on-going issue!

Best,
Yahoo! Groups Team