At 11:03 PM 5/1/02, Dennis, ref to Ballew wrote:

 >>Are you also finding the list owner forum on Yahoo
 >>groups to be incredibly useful and helpful?

 >Are you kidding?

Not especially a joke. For example,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/emaillist-managers/
is a semi-moderated self-help group that has been
running since eGroups days. The advice there is
generally good, as there's little in the way of Yahoo
behavior that they've not encountered yet. Also,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/emaillist-managers-adult/
is a low-traffic list dedicated to the "adult" area of the
service; it tends to be useful for forewarning purposes:
Yahoo often introduces unpleasant surprises (such as
"ads on top" and storage deletions) in the adult lists
first before visiting them upon the rest of YGroups.

No "official" lists exist for the Groups area any more.
And, unlike the defunct eGroups-status, YGroups-status
is hardly ever used for system notices.

 >Yahoo's list management documentation is a total joke.
 >If you stick to the simple common questions you're OK,
 >but get out into less travelled territory and you might as
 >well be falling off a cliff.

A part of their "free services must be problem free" policy
-- their problem-free service does not _require_ extensive
documentation or customer support. As a result, you
learn to become very self-sufficient over there. And
sometimes angst is involved. (sigh)

YGroups has a nice web management interface with some
truly nifty options such as easy post editing. We moved off
it for other reasons, and we're still maintaining our YGroups
list via the "remote group" setting. So far, it's been a useful
backup that we're using for people who don't like the Listserv
format digests as well as other problem subscriptions (e.g.,
Yahoo ignores MSN errors, and probes and reactivates the
YMail over-quota bounces without a peep).

Vickie West
Freelance, peach.ease.lsoft.com
and Freelance, YahooGroups