Apologies for the extremely late notice but because of a hardware failure Groups
will have 20 minutes of downtime tonight at 6:00 pm Pacific time (Thursday
January 5th). 25% of groups will be affected.

- Gordon
Yahoo! Groups Team

Yahoo! Groups will be continuing our database maintenance on Monday
night, January 9, at 9:00 pm Pacific Time (5:00 am on the 10th (GMT)).
For approximately 30 minutes, the Groups site will be down for all
groups. In addition, 25% of groups will be unavailable for an
additional 30-45 minutes.  Messages sent to affected groups during
that time will be queued and delivered once the groups are back online.

We appreciate everyone's patience and apologize for the unusually
frequent series of maintenance downtimes we have had to schedule
recently. The Holiday season gifted us with an unfortunate combination
of hardware failures and data corruption issues. Fortunately, we're
seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, although folks should
expect at least one more period of downtime in the coming weeks.

- Gordon
Yahoo! Groups Team

Hi Folks,

Should have posted this earlier, but I wanted to let everyone know
that we are aware of the delays in email delivery that are affecting
many groups right now. The problem is not related to any of the
database and hardware work we were doing earlier in the year.
Rather, the primary cause is the "My Wife virus
(http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_138027.htm), which has caused a
huge spike in the number of emails sent to Yahoo! Groups. This spike
has gone beyond the capacity of our current systems to handle, which
is causing the delays in email delivery.

We have already taken two steps to address the issue, which has
begun to reduce the number of delays:
- We are dropping (i.e. not delivering) all outgoing email that
includes the virus (in other words, we are not sending infected
messages to groups).
- We have added additional server capacity

And we are planning to increase that capacity even more. However,
until the virus has fully played itself out or more ISPs have taken
steps to reduce the amount of email they are sending to us (by
dropping messages that contain the virus rather than forcing us to
do it), there may continue to be some delays.

Our apologies for any inconvenience.

- Gordon
Yahoo! Groups Team

Many groups are currently experiencing problems with their photo
section (specifically around creating new albums) and chat rooms. We
believe it is related to a update to our servers yesterday evening.

We are aware of the problem and we're actively working to solve it. We
apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

- The Yahoo! Groups Team

We have received reports of problems with email delivery to some
Yahoo! groups. We are actively investigating and apologize for any
inconvenience.

Thank you,

- The Yahoo! Groups Team

The Yahoo! Groups email delivery system has been experiencing delays.
We apologize for the inconvenience.  We are working diligently to keep
this problem from recurring.  We understand your frustration and
appreciate your patience.

- The Yahoo! Groups Team

Please note:  this is an announcement-only group.  If you have a
question, please contact Yahoo! Groups Customer Care at:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/groups/

Subscribers to yg-alerts have used this group in the past for news of
Yahoo! Groups outages and issues. Today, I'm pleased to introduce the
Yahoo! Groups Team blog, a new improved way to get the latest news
about Yahoo! Groups
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

The blog will be geared at Yahoo! Group owners and moderators. It will
be the central place where we'll share news about the team, outages,
issues, and notable activity in the community. Our planned features
include Question of the Day, Moderator Spotlight, and a peek into the
life of the Yahoo! Groups Team. The blog won't be a substitute for
Yahoo! Customer Care-- the best and most efficient way to get help for
technical issues is via the Groups Help links. But if you're seeing an
issue that is affecting a lot of your members and looks like a trend,
we want to know about it. As your Community Manager, I'll be using
your comments on the blog as a way to learn more about you and what
you'd like to see from Yahoo! Groups now and in the future.

Whether you are new to moderating or have been at it for years, you
can look to the Yahoo! Groups Team Blog as a resource to make your job
a little easier. We hope you'll use the blog comments section to share
some of your expertise and experience with the Yahoo! Groups Moderator
Community. I'll see you on the blog!

-- Carole McManus
   Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! 360 Community Manager

Yahoo! Groups was unavailable or very slow to load from 12:30 pm to
approximately 3:20pm Pacific today. As of 3:20 pm Pacific, services
are repaired and fully recovered. Mail queued during the event is
being delivered now. Our engineers are following up now and further
investigating the cause.

We appreciate your patience during the outage, and apologize for the
inconvenience.

This message is also posted on the Yahoo! Groups Team Blog, where you
can go for news and info in the event of a Groups outage that affects
message delivery: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

We had reports that on Tuesday December 5 users with SBC email
accounts (including sbcglobal, pacbell, swbell, snet, ameritech,
prodigy, wans, nvbell, and flash domains) began bouncing. The glitch
was on SBC's end, caused by a fix to a different issue they
implemented on their servers that day. Our team has been working with
our contacts at SBC and the issue has been resolved.

There is no need for moderators to take action to restore bouncing
members since we have processes in place to automatically reactivate
users within a matter of days, although by actively monitoring
bouncing members and sending manual reactivation notices you can speed
the process up. You can read more about automatic and manual
reactivation here: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/members/members-17.html.

Thanks to those of you who alerted us to the SBC bounces, and thanks
for your patience as we worked to resolve them.

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

This info is also posted on the Yahoo! Groups Team Blog, your resource
for the latest news and updates from Yahoo! Groups.
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team?p=199

We've had reports that some Yahoo! Groups members with Hotmail and MSN
mail accounts have been bouncing since approximately December 29,
2006. The error message many of you are reporting is "550 Command
rejected for policy reasons."

We are working with our contacts on the Hotmail team to understand why
this occurred and will let you know when the problem has been
resolved. We appreciate your patience and we apologize for the
inconvenience this has caused.

We also want to acknowledge an outage the U.S. and International
Groups sites experienced early today (Pacific time). Users who
attempted to access their groups on the Web experienced timeouts on
their browsers between the hours of 12:45 a.m. and 2:15 a.m. Pacific.
This issue has been resolved and we are investigating solutions to
prevent similar outages in the future.

— Carole McManus
Community Manager

Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance on Monday, January
15, 2007, at 9 p.m. (Pacific time).  We expect a brief service
interruption.

Some users may not be able to access http://groups.yahoo.com for a 20
to 30 minute period from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. (Pacific time). Any groups
messages sent at that time will be delivered after 11 p.m.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you and your
members. Scheduled maintenance keeps our servers running smoothly so
your groups can run smoothly. We appreciate your patience during this
downtime.

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

This message has also been posted on the Yahoo! Groups Team blog
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team , your source for the latest
news and updates for Yahoo! Groups owners and moderators.

Due to a database-related issue earlier today, we are experiencing a
Groups email backlog. Delivery of messages posted between 7 a.m. and 4
p.m. (Pacific time) today, January 25, may be delayed several hours.

Messages posted now are being processed through our backup mail
servers, so they will be delivered immediately.  While our primary
servers catch up, Groups users may see messages that were posted
earlier today delivered out of order.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you and your group
members.

The Yahoo! Groups Team

This message has also been posted on the Yahoo! Groups Team blog
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team , your source for the latest
news and updates for Yahoo! Groups owners and moderators.

Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance from about 10 p.m. to
4 a.m. (Pacific time) Thursday, February 15
(http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ). Access to web
messages and email may be delayed during this time. Check the Yahoo!
Groups Team Blog for English-language updates:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team.

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance. Regular upkeep of
our servers keeps Yahoo! Groups running smoothly for us all.

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

We want to acknowledge the reports that not all groups are receiving
email. Some of these groups are seeing the posts on their group
archive on the Web, but not receiving them via email. This problem has
been difficult to diagnose, since it is affecting some groups but not
others.

Our engineers have been investigating the root cause since we became
aware of the problem last night. We will continue to work on this and
will keep you updated via the Groups Team Blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team .

In the meantime, we appreciate your patience and apologize for the
inconvenience.

The Yahoo! Groups Team

From February 28 about 2:30 p.m. (Pacific time) until March 1 about
11:15 a.m. (Pacific time) (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/),
some members of some groups were not receiving email. Some members of
some of these groups were able to see the posts on their group archive
on the Web, but were not receiving them via email. Groups mail
delivery is back to normal as of about 11:15 a.m. (Pacific time). We
now have more information about what caused this.

While we were working on an improvement to our email delivery systems,
email delivery was inadvertently suspended for some members of some
groups. This problem did not affect all Groups users. Unfortunately,
while messages posted to affected groups during this time were saved
to group archives, the messages cannot now be delivered via email. If
your group's archives are open to your members (more
info about Archive settings:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/messages/messages-16.html), your members
can access the undelivered messages via the Web. If your group's archives are
not open to your members, you may want to suggest that your members resend any
messages they had sent between yesterday afternoon and this morning, if they
want to ensure that all members of the group receive them.

Yesterday's work was part of our ongoing efforts to improve the
performance of Yahoo! Groups and was not supposed to involve any
downtime for users. The delivery glitch was the result of human error,
and because it only affected some members of some groups, it delayed
both our awareness of the problem and our efforts to resolve it. We
sincerely regret the inconvenience it may have caused.

The Yahoo! Groups Team

We've had reports that some users with Gmail accounts have not been
receiving Groups mail since approximately March 14, 2007.  This was a
difficult issue to diagnose, because we were able to replicate the
issue with some, but not all, of our test Gmail accounts. Some of us
were missing Groups messages in our Gmail accounts, some of us were
receiving them as usual. We appreciate those of you who wrote in
detail about the problems your members were having on the Groups
Technical Issues board and in email to Customer Care.  Having detailed
information helps us get to the bottom of issues faster.

The problem appears to be on Gmail's end. We have gotten in touch with
the Gmail team and are working to resolve this issue. We'll post an
update when this has been resolved.

We've posted further information about email delivery on the Yahoo!
Groups Team Blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team?p=3094

Carole McManus
Community Manager

We sincerely apologize for the mail delivery bug that caused many
group members to receive multiple copies of group mail. This bug was
introduced when we were working to increase mail delivery speed (one
of our biggest user requests).

We pushed a fix at midnight March 29 (Pacific time), but unfortunately
at that point a backlog of mail was still being delivered. We're
confident that the bug is fixed on our end— however some ISPs may
still be delivering backlogged mail to some users.  We're monitoring
your comments and appreciate you letting us know your group's status
on the Groups Team Blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

The Groups product team has also posted a response to user feedback
regarding IFrames and group description in the latest blog entry.

We appreciate your patience and again we're very sorry for the
inconvenience.

-- The Yahoo! Groups Team

Yahoo!Groups is being affected by a network connectivity issue that is
affecting a number of Yahoo! properties. This issue is not specific to
Groups. We are working with the Yahoo! Network Operations team to
resolve the problem, which began Friday April 27, at approximately
8:00 a.m. Pacific (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/).

We do not have an estimate of when this will be resolved. We will keep
you updated via the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

Yahoo! Groups will undergo scheduled maintenance from about 9 p.m. to
10 p.m. (Pacific time) Thursday, July 19
(http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html ). Access to web
messages and email may be delayed during this time.

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance. Regular upkeep of
our servers keeps Yahoo! Groups running smoothly for us all.

— The Yahoo! Groups Team

As of 8/21 5:30 pm PDT: The system failure that was causing message
delivery delays has been corrected. While our engineers have
identified and corrected the root cause of this issue on the Yahoo!
Groups side, you may still continue to receive messages from your ISP
over the next few days. We appreciate your patience as we worked
toward resolution and are sincerely sorry for any inconvenience this
has caused. We've taken measures to avoid a recurrence of this issue
in the future.

For more details on this issue, please visit the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

Thank you,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

We're aware some groups are currently experiencing technical issues.
The engineering team has identfied the problem and we are currently in
recovery mode. Some groups may continue to experience message delays
or error messages over the next three hours. If it looks like this
issue will persist longer than that, we'll post an update to the
Groups Team blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/y_groups_team

Thank you for your patience,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

In the coming week we will be making some changes to yg-alerts. Not
only will you be able to get email notifications with useful Yahoo!
Groups information and news, but you'll also find valuable groups
resources.

We are planning to transform YG-Alerts into the *new and improved*
Moderator Central. What this means is that we are going to recreate
what you know as Moderator Central on the Groups platform. You will
find all the same resources currently found on Moderator Central
(http://moderators.groups.yahoo.com/)such as the message boards, the
new moderator tours, the Groups team blog, as well as all other
channels that currently exist to exchange ideas and help each other.

This change will make it easier for us to update and refresh content
on a regular basis in attempt to delivery more relevant information
to all of you. It will also provide us with a channel to communicate
directly with Groups Moderators through the email notifications sent
out from this group.

If you only want to receive alerts for issues affecting users and
site downtime you can edit your membership preferences to message
delivery of special notices only.

I'll send additional details out shortly.

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Community Manager

The Yahoo! Groups Team is hosting our first-ever Groups Moderator Town Hall next
month. It's happening Tuesday, October 9th from 6–9 p.m. at the Yahoo! Campus
in Sunnyvale.

If you live in the Bay Area, and own or moderate an active group with at least
50 members and want to learn more, please visit the Groups team blog for more
details:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=6941

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

We're aware that some users in some groups are experiencing issues with delivery
of daily digests.  We are currently investigating the problem and hope to
resolve this issue as quickly as possible.


Thank you for your patience,
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager

We believe that we have fixed the digest problem and that the groups that have
been affected (~20%) should begin to receive digest normally starting tomorrow.
But we will be monitoring over the weekend to be sure. Our apologies for the
inconvenience to digest users, and we thank you for your patience.

- Yahoo! Groups Team

--- Jami wrote:
>
> We're aware that some users in some groups are experiencing issues with
delivery of daily digests.  We are currently investigating the problem and hope
to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.
>
>
> Thank you for your patience,
> Jami Heldt
> Groups Community Manager
>

Email delivery times are a bit like the tires on your car. You usually only
think about them when something goes wrong.

I say this because I'm guessing most folks may not have noticed anything about a
change in the delivery speed of email sent through Yahoo! Groups. But thanks to
the hard work of the back-end engineers and the Operations team, there has
indeed been a change -- a positive one!

Read the full story on the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7315

- Yahoo! Groups Team

It’s my pleasure to re-introduce Moderator Central. This site was created for
new and experienced moderators to stay looped in on the latest and greatest
Yahoo! Groups news and provide a channel for moderators to connect with one
another to ask questions, share advice, collaborate, and find resources.

Some of the tools Moderator Central offers to help you share and collaborate
with other moderators include:

Message Boards the place for new moderators to ask for advice about setting up
their group, for more experienced moderators to discuss tips on member
recruitment and managing group dynamics, or to stay up to speed on technical
issues, common challenges, and workarounds. These public forums are in a
threaded message format, so they are easy to follow and search. You can even
subscribe to an RSS feed or Alert so you don't miss a thing.

Getting Started makes it easy to start your group off on the right foot. Take
our tours and learn more about creating your group and building your membership.

Yahoo! Groups Suggestion Board allows users to submit product suggestions to the
Yahoo! Groups team and vote and comment on the contributions they feel are most
valuable and relevant.

Yahoo! Answers about Yahoo! Groups are displayed on the Moderator Central home
page, making it easy to share your expertise and recognize the contributions of
others by voting and rating their contributions.

Some new things you’ll find on Moderator Central are the Best of Yahoo!
Groups, where we shine the spotlight on some of Yahoo! Group’s finest. You can
also find the Groups Podcast, where we’ll highlight a fun Groups related topic
to share with you on a monthly basis. In addition to these new features, we will
have the ability to refresh content regularly to make it more relevant & timely
for you.  So take some time to look around and let us know what you think and
let us know what you’d like to see by commenting on the Groups team blog:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7362

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Community Manager

On October 9th over 135 group moderators from the Bay Area joined the Yahoo!
Groups team for its first ever Groups Moderator Town Hall at the Yahoo! campus
in Sunnyvale. Our goal with this type of event is to provide moderators with an
opportunity to engage with the Yahoo! Groups team as well as one other.

To read more and to learn where our next Groups Moderator Town Hall will be,
please visit the Groups Team blog:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51470/*http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-nNIST_woRKGLBc4\
JxGgUEhtmZ_EL?p=7386

Thanks!
Jami
Groups Community Manager

Apologies for not posting to the blog about this issue earlier, but we do want
to let folks know that we're aware of the problem with Yahoo! Mail mistakenly
diverting some messages from Yahoo! Groups to the Yahoo! Mail spam or bulk
folder.

The Mail team has just tonight pushed a fix to the problem, but they're not yet
sure if the fix will address the problem completely or only partially. So if
you're still finding messages from Groups sent Wednesday (10/24) or later being
wrongly diverted to your Spam or Bulk Mail folder, please let our Customer Care
team know:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/yahoogroups/general.html

It will help us solve the problem more quickly.

Thank you,

- Yahoo! Groups Team

The Yahoo! Groups Team is hosting a Groups Moderator Town Hall next Tuesday,
November 6th from 6–9 PM at the Westin Bonaventure in downtown Los Angeles.

If you live in the Los Angeles Area, and own or moderate an active group and
want to learn more, please send an email with a link to your group to:
communityevents@....

Thanks!
Jami Heldt
Groups Community Manager