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October 2019 Need To Leave Yahoo Groups

member management (needs password)
add or invite new members (needs password)

Plans for the switch

We discussed and decided that for at least the short term, we would take me (Steve Isenberg) up on my offer to host the email list as part of my Dreamhost ISP account.
CharlyS is checking on what it would take for the group to get a 501c3; once we have this, then Dreamhost will give us a free account, and it's likely that groups.io would as well.
QUESTION: Does Lexington Community Center have a 501c3? If so could we use its 501c3 to get a free account at one of these?

Email list tasks

Get email addresses from Yahoo GroupDONE
Create new groupDONEList address (for posting messages) is: LCTG@toku.us (or LCTG@lists.toku.us)
Test new group, send email to it and see it distribute message to select test subjectsDONEadded footer, sent test message
Add all current Yahoo group's email addresses to the new groupDONE
Send message to Yahoo Group saying we are switching and give new addresssent to new list DONE
Add list address for new group to the YahooGroup (so email sent to old Yahoo group will go to new group for distributionNOT DONE as I turned off mailings to the list
Set all members of current Yahoo group so not receive email (means we rely on new group)DONE by disallowing email to the yahoo list

When this is all done,

  • All current Yahoo group members will be on the new list

Files stored on Yahoo Groups

Need to download all of the documents/files to non-yahoo spaceCharlyS did this? VerifyTBD
Find place and way to store all of these files (Steve's Wiki? Elsewhere?) TBD

Old message archives

Need to see how to get old messagesDONE, downloaded 9,233 messages to a mbox file
How to store them somewhere so they can be searched and readTBD

Using new list

See the group wiki at http://lctg.toku.us as I have put usage info there.

Subcommittee members

  • Bob Melanson
  • Bob Primak
  • CharlyS
  • Evie Isenberg
  • Harry Forsdick
  • Jonathan Goode
  • John Rudy
  • Lynnell Stern
  • Peter Albin
  • Steve Isenberg

Older material

CategoryNeedsPost-Yahoo Groups Solution
Email ListWay to add/delete members.
Email ListMust support multiple person management
Email ListArchiving of messages and way for later lookup.
File StorageWay to save presentation handouts(this wiki)
Videos of presentationsWay to collect links to presentations(this wiki)

Other needs

NeedSolution
Transition mailing list to new spotCan do by export list and import at new spot if new spot allows
Transition email history to new spot
Transition archived files to new spot

Hosting Options

Options from https://lifehacker.com/how-to-save-and-migrate-your-yahoo-groups-data-before-i-1839172243

Option Cost Notes
Groups.io $220 for first year
Google Groups
Facebook works like usual Facebook feed
Discord Mostly for gaming and live interactions like when you're playing a game; voice and text chat
Slack free 5GB file storage; saves 10k messages, searchable
Dreamhost discussion group free (part of Steve's subscription) Uses Mailman interface

Groups.io notes

Another email list/group is transferring to groups.io and here is information they've shared with me. (Thanks CH)

  • Their group is restricted, like YahooGroups, moderators must approve members
  • The group has a private message archive, only new members require message approval
  • That group does not need calendars, chat, or database
  • They will consider Hashtags and Subgroups later
  • There are features for Wiki and Polls which they can enable later
  • It's likely that everyone will get an invite from groups.io
  • Some concern/curiosity that cost may be more than $110
  • Groups.io cannot get your Yahoo password so each member will need a password for Groups.io
  • Regarding transfer to groups.io, groups.io says in brief: transfer requests must be given the go-ahead by 12/1/2019 as they cannot guarantee transfers submitted after that date. Also it appears that most Photos sections are currently [as of 10/19/2019] having an outage and it isn't known if they'll be restored prior to that deadline.

Dreamhost notes

Dreamhost is a ISP (Internet Service Provider) that offers free services to 501c3 organizations. I (Steve Isenberg) own an account there (I pay for it) and it is no added cost to me to create another email list and to store files there.

  • Dreamhost uses the Mailman email interface that provides good email list management, and management of the list can be handled by several people, not just me.
  • As with groups.io, each member of the list would have a password and would be able to manage their subscription. The password would not come from Yahoo.
  • Files would be stored as part of the wiki I also have for LCTG; although there may be other options we could explore.

Older Discussion on the Topic

From Late 2018 - Early 2019

Desirables for new email list

Currently considering Steve Isenberg's Dreamhost discussion list, lexingtoncomputergroup@toku.us

Features

  1. Messaging (email distribution list)
  2. Membership (who receives email)
  3. Logging presentations (videos of presentations)
  4. Simple website (a la Weebly) which could include:
    1. Record of past presentations (Logging of presentations) including Video of presentation, URLs of web pages used in presentation.
    2. Schedule for upcoming presentations. This would be a fixed place where you
    3. Blog for occasional articles written by members of importance to all members and of a long lasting nature.
    4. A “facebook” page (in the true original meaning of the concept) of members names and pictures.

Other Considerations

[John Rudy]

  1. What do we do with the current system (so we don’t forget anything). This is not the same as “what could be done with the current system?”
  2. What is done outside the current system (usually by me). I maintain a word document which is reset after each Steering Committee Meeting and then up-reved between meetings. This is periodically distributed and Jonathan Goode uses it for meeting notices.
  3. What does Jon do for meeting notices? I think he merely shortens what I have in the Word document and then of course he has to distribute it. I suppose that is #2 on Harry’s list [4b above]
  4. I was thinking that a small group could initially work this and come up with a tentative proposal that appears to meet the needs and is buildable by OUR folks in a reasonable amount of time. Then share this with everyone. The initial group, I suppose, should be anyone who wants to be in it though more than, say, 6 is probably unwieldy

Comments

[Harry]
There is no problem with using two systems – Steve's ​Mailman is an excellent system used successfully by many, and I have had excellent results with Weebly, having used it since its inception on 2006 for all of my website development. It has all of the multimedia features you could want, and also a good ability for collaboration by multiple editors. It's what I used (with very little investment of time) for the lexcandt.weebly.com website. I used the plan white wrapper theme to avoid wasting my time of dreaming up clever graphics… Seems quite consistent with the Mailman look and feel. Just to show how quick and easy it is, I updated it to reflect the four items mentioned in my list above.

[George]
We should introduce this idea at one of our upcoming meetings and get feedback from the group. Also get feedback from those who don’t/can’t come to the meetings.

[Jonathan] This seems to be clean and nice, but I'm wondering what problem we're trying to solve. Are there things that bother you about our current Yahoo pages? The things that bother me are that Yahoo no longer automatically generates meeting notices from the calendar (and sometimes blocks access to it). Right now, I keep our Yahoo home page (at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/LexingtonComputerGroup/management/settings) pretty much up to date. I stopped keeping our calendar (at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/LexingtonComputerGroup/events) up to date a few months after it stopped generating meeting notices. I also manually generate meeting notices using the general format of the previously automatically generated notices. Do we need more or different? Is there a calendar facility that will allow automatic notice generation?


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new_email_list.txt · Last modified: 2021.12.22 13:51 by 127.0.0.1