Maintenance activity completed successfully and all systems working fine.

-Updated 10:15 pm PST Dec 16th 2013

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Due to system maintenance,  some functions of Yahoo! Groups may be unavailable for a few hours starting December 16th 7:30 pm PST. Emails sent to your groups may be delivered late during this time.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

We’re delighted to share that we’ll begin rolling out the redesigned Yahoo Groups to all countries over the coming days. Users in Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Canada, UK and Ireland will soon see the reinvigorated Groups experience. 

We began rolling out the redesign to our US based users a couple of months ago. But for those of you who are seeing it for the first time, here’s a quick overview of what’s new:

1. Refreshed Groups site: We’ve given the interface a new, cleaner, modernized look
2. Simplified user experience: Do more in fewer steps. For example, you can now create a new Group in two simple steps rather than seven
3. New home page: Your groups are now listed in the left rail and you can access them in one click.  You can also see all the recent updates in your Groups from the new “Groups Home” page
4. New “All my Groups” Page : “All My Groups” gives you a snapshot of the activity in all of your groups for the last 7 days and allows moderators to see pending items for each of their groups
5. Conversations: “Messages” are now called “Conversations”. You’ll notice the new threaded conversation experience. We hope you find it easy to manage your different conversation threads.
6. New Photo experience: View or download your group’s photos in the completely redesigned photos section.
7. Optimized Moderator tools: We’ve optimized the moderator Control Panel to help moderators do more in fewer steps. Control who join and view content posted in your group in a single click using our present Group types “Public”, “Restricted” or “Private”.
8. In-line Video Playback: View video links directly within your groups. Just post a link from any of the supported sites and you’ll see the option to play the video in the message.

For more, see our brief overview video. You can also take the quick product tour that we’ve published on the homepage. 

We hope you enjoy the new Groups experience and we’re continuing to work on making improvements and adding new features. Please continue to help us improve by sharing your feedback with us on our our feedback forum.

-Yahoo! Groups Team

We’re delighted to share that we’ve launched an enhancement to the pending approvals feature for moderators. This is the latest in a host of enhancements and fixes that we’ve been rolling out based on your feedback. Check out the list below of some of the things we’ve been working on.

1.        Revamped pending messages approval tab

-          As a moderator, you can now see all messages pending for approval in one page.  On each message you can now approve, reject, edit and save, reject with reply to sender or mark as spam.

2.        Enhanced messages list view

-          Ability to view larger message preview

3.        Ability to multi-select and delete messages, for moderators

-          Use checkboxes to select messages to delete in bulk.

4.        “View source” option on messages

-          View HTML version of message posted while reading messages

5.        Download link on Photos

-          View or download images by using the download link on photos

6.        Accessibility improvements

-          Improved performance with screen readers

7.        Scheduled Notifications Improvements

-          Scheduled files now all show under notifications in the Control Panel

Thank you for all the feedback you’ve shared with us since we launched the redesign. We’ve been listening closely to it and it has been crucial in helping us prioritize enhancements and fixes. Please continue to share your feedback with us on our feedback forum.

-          The Yahoo Groups team

You can now view video links directly within your groups. Just post a link from any of the supported sites below, and you’ll see the option to play the video in the message.

The supported video sites are:

• 1. Yahoo Video
• 2. Youtube
• 3. Vimeo
• 4. Daily Motion
• 5. Meta cafe

Please try it out and share your feedback and suggestions on our  Feedback Forum: http://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/209451

 -The Yahoo Groups team

We’ve introduced threaded messaging in Conversations so you can now reply in line and send attachments. We hope you’ll find it similar to your email experience.

When you open a topic, the original message in the topic is displayed first, followed by the responses displayed by date.

If there are a lot of messages in a topic, the original message and the latest message will be displayed, with the messages in between collapsed.

You can toggle between expanded and collapsed messages by clicking the expand/collapse button on the top right of the topic.

We like to think of Groups as one big discussion between folks who share common interests, so we’re renamed the “Messages” page, “Conversations”.  We hope you like it!

The “Conversations” page has three tabs – “Topics”, “Messages” and “Trending”

• The “Topics” tab groups messages by, as you might have guessed, topic. You can toggle the order of topics by selecting “Latest first” to order by the most recent activity, or “Oldest first” to show the earliest topics.

• The “Messages” tab displays the individual replies to each topic. You can search for messages by message number via the message search tool, or view all the messages sent in a particular month by selecting “Message History”.

• The “Trending” tab displays the hot topics that members are discussing right now. A message is considered ‘trending’ when it has at least 3 replies in a short time.