Neo

Yahoo Ignoring Its Own Security Flaws

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Safeowl

In light of the Heartbleed story, I felt that we needed a post here about the inherent dangers of Yahoo’s new redesign. Not counting all the other issues, the new redesign is a security risk all by itself, full of numerous problems that can easily be exploited.

Yahoo is not a safe environment, and even patching Heartbleed and using encrypting won’t fix all their problems. They have caused so many issues in their Groups and Mail services with their new “improved” redesign that they are broken and unsafe.

Without any ability to regulate them, spammers can overrun us because we can’t see what we are approving and sometimes it appears to be blank when approving.

Embedded images aren’t shown either, and “reject with a reply” sometimes goes to the entire group instead of privately.  

Near the beginning of the NEO changeover, private information in Freecycle Groups was mistakenly going public and was displayed to 18,000 users.  Although it was supposedly fixed, trust was broken, and most Freecycle groups have long since left.

The system breaks and hangs; things don’t work. They threw us in this “test” with no warning in August of 2013 and have not ever publicly acknowledged that Group members still have these  problems.

**************************************************
From the Yahoo Uservoice Feedback Forum
1,633 votes

After filing an incident report (130824-020762) with your so called Customer Care, I have come to the conclusion that you really couldn’t care any less. “You are part of a test group and cannot be removed” is not an adequate response nor helpful in any way. I not only don’t appreciate the Yahoo attitude, as far as I’ concerned you can keep it. I will start my groups over in Google Groups and leave Yahoo and it’s advertisers to their own demise.

**************************************************

It’s now been 8 months and yet we are still stuck in this broken, buggy, unstable mess. Yahoo needs to man-up and admit their new interface is a failure and no amount of encrypting or securing will make it function correctly. It doesn’t even function on the mobile devices it was designed for!

We’ve been hacked.

Attacked with ads that were inappropriate or with malware.

Suffered severe mail outages that also affected Group Mail, and and Yahoo Customer Care has been little or no help.

Suffered loss of moderator controls and features and had many other issues:

And nothing has been done to fix it. Yahoo figures no one will care about us; we’re just “Groups” users who don’t matter. Mail users got an admission of failure, an adjustment on a feature, and an apology. We got nothing. Once loyal longtime users of Yahoo, we were simply disregarded.

So we are once again in the fight of our lives against Yahoo’s new “improvements” because the new format called NEO has been a disaster from day one that has impacted and changed many thousands of users’ lives forever.

The secret Yahoo doesn’t want you to know? Yahoo’s new “upgrades” DO NOT WORK. They are broken, buggy, dysfunctional, have security issues, and worse, they cause physical harm to the elderly and disabled. We’ve had enough; it’s been long enough, and something needs to be done NOW!

Meanwhile, they are trying to hide their failure. In fact, instead of properly evaluating feedback that we’ve been providing in their Feedback Forum, now Yahoo is DELETING it!  Fortunately, I had already archived a lot of it.

This is now day #220 of our Crusade, and we are still going strong. We need to get our story in the press, like mail did, in order to bring public opinion to the table and hopefully force Yahoo to roll back this disaster of an “improvement” and return us to the classic format that we all knew and loved, that was secure and user friendly, and that WORKED.

But if nothing else, even if we fail and can’t get them to return to Classic, my group and another group of 3,000+ teenagers and twenty-somethings who have joined forces with me are determined to hold Yahoo accountable for what they have done in the public eye, if nowhere else. We are going to bring their treatment of loyal users to the light of day, one way or another, and you can help us do that!

Please read this and consider helping by putting our Crusade Site URL and our fight in the press.

Thanks,

Nightowl >8#

Beware the Ides of March

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Foreword by Nightowl: This post was written in 2015. But it still tells you what Mayer did to us for years, and how we were silenced when we tried to get help and stop her.

Now Verizon is about to delete us out of existence on Dec 14, 2019, so we are hoping to have more time alotted to us, so we can preserve our history!

and we can’t seem to get them to understand that

WE ARE HERE.
WE NEVER LEFT!
AND WE NEED RESCUING, NOT DELETING.

In what amounts to a tacit admission of failure, Yahoo! deleted thousands of Groups-related suggestions and bug reports and has nothing to say to disappointed users.

Early on March 15th, 2015, Yahoo Groups users began to report that the official Feedback forum suddenly contained a lot fewer feedback items. A few thousand fewer. The content of the forum had been decimated from recollections of 1,600 to 2,300 items previously to as few as 150 that day. This was reported to Yahoo that day by way of the Yahoo Groups section on Yahoo! Answers. Thus far Yahoo has declined to make any public comment on the deletions in the Answers section cited, in its blog, or in the Feedback forum itself.

Absent any comment, it is tempting to suggest that Yahoo was simply overwhelmed by the number of feedback items and arbitrarily discarded the lower-ranked items to bring the number down to a manageable level. If true, that would amount to a tacit admission that the “new experience” is more troubled than Yahoo can publicly acknowledge or privately cope with.

Some users have suggested that this might have been a simple house-cleaning, ridding the forum of duplicate or inappropriate items. But if that was the intent, Yahoo discarded an unknown number of babies with the bathwater. Some users have posted their bug reports and suggestions again. Others have simply walked away in disgust that their time and effort was so carelessly discarded.

Yahoo, having already caused much discontent within the Groups community over the roll-out of their “new experience,” scarcely needed to give the user community another slap in the face. It is incomprehensible that Yahoo would discard user feedback in bulk at the same time that they are working feverishly to make a show of rolling out the return of lost features and the continued improvement of the “new experience.” If anyone thought they were sweeping problems “under the rug,” that was very short-sighted. Discarding bug reports in particular would only serve to prolong the period of time before the bug gets discovered again and corrected.

Discarding suggestions, on the other hand, is simply rude. The Feedback forum has a mechanism for marking a suggestion as “Declined” if Yahoo decides not to implement it. That may disappoint the person who made the suggestion, but at least they have been given the courtesy of a reply.

— Shal

Update: I tweeted Jeff Bonforte, SVP of Communications Products at Yahoo!, about the situation on Friday, before writing the above, and received a prompt reply from him Monday morning, after that was written but before it was published here. The reply did not address the issue in my opinion.

 

Additional Comment by Nightowl >8#:

I have plenty to say about this issue. Yahoo has been hiding uservoice posts ever since we started the crusade. First they were marking them done, declined, or whatever and moving them, which would break the links we were sending to the press. Then they carelessly started rushing fixes, which was worse, and everything under the sun was breaking. NOW, instead of hiding, falsely marking, or moving comments, they are DELETING them — discarding them with no response to users — a blatant statement on their part that we are nothing to them, that we don’t matter. Well, we are here to tell you GROUPS USERS MATTER! And I archived a huge number of those comments that are now gone from view on Yahoo.

So if you want to see what users have REALLY been saying about the new redesign of Yahoo, we have it archived, just ask.

Click on The Feedback Trench and go from there. I promise you, there is a LOT of reading there and almost none of it is positive about the new NEO redesign.

Oh, and if you want some additional reading, click on For The Press. You’ll find two very interesting archived tweet convos between a group of distressed users and Mr. Jeff Bonforte himself!

Happy Reading!!!

 

Making it Clear to Yahoo

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Lawyer Owl 1By Adrian Smith
Reposted with permission by Nightowl >8#

  • Yahoo NEO has destroyed our databases.  Students are no longer able to use the database to post……anything.
  • Yahoo NEO violates the privacy of users that post directly to the group by showing the IP address of the user.  Our network is fortunate to use a server to bypass this security problem.
  • Yahoo NEO does not allow aliases to be used.
  • Yahoo NEO is in violation of the ADA and other nations’ rights of the disabled.  How dare you treat these people with contempt.  How dare you treat these people as yesterday’s garbage.  How dare you roll out this format without any type of notice.  We owe it to our neighbors to fight you at every opportunity and to bring you to justice.
  • We have every right to hold your advertisers accountable for blocking access to the groups with ads you place on the message board that stops the equipment they use.
  • Yahoo NEO discriminates against the elderly and poor.  The elderly on fixed incomes cannot afford the computer upgrades needed to navigate your new format that is a RAM hog.
  • You dismissed the hundreds of thousands of complaints against NEO. You have been disingenuous to the media and concerned individuals by saying the classic system was outdated.  You had every opportunity to build a new foundation with the classic groups.  The dollars you’ve spent with just the new logo could have been used to enhance the classic groups.

We will not reveal our final strategy.  We will say that a growing number of concerned individuals are aware of what you have done.

  • This format is in violation of public website access defined in the DOJ/ADA.  Yahoo was warned from day one that the format is illegal but has not heeded the concerns of the visually impaired.
  • This format is in violation of international conventions adopted by the majority of sovereign nations through the auspices of the United Nations. Rights to public access to to internet websites for the elderly and disabled. The placement of ads causes the reading equipment of the blind to stop functioning.
  • This format is discriminatory against the elderly.The elderly have warned Yahoo since day one that the format causes their older computers and slow modems to freeze. The high usage of RAM depletes the functionality of their computers over a period of time.
  • This format cannot be used by those that have peripheral vision and nerve damage.  Once again, users have voiced and written their concerns to Yahoo. These concerns have been dismissed.  Yahoo claims that measures have been taken to address these concerns.  Their proclamations are not based in reality.  Their proclamations are for the sole attention of media scrutiny.
  • Yahoo needs to be held accountable for forcing this unwanted, unneeded, and unpopular format on millions of users that have complained about this format from day one.

Originally posted here.

Yahoo Finds New Ways to Spam Its Members

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spamowlBy Charley Silverman

This article is a follow-up to a previous article written in the hopes of highlighting the problems caused by Yahoo with its hasty decision to NEO-fy its membership.  In February, I wrote an article about how Yahoo’s awful decision to inflict its NEO model on its users affected one business community, namely the members of the QFLEA small business community.

You can read that article here.

This community consists of small business people who run their businesses on websites and list those businesses at QFLEA.com.  A major component of our shared experience is the QFLEA Yahoo Group, where said businesses have the opportunity to exchange information and ideas that are beneficial to all.

We’ve run this Yahoo Group since 1999 and have shared over 20,000 posts related specifically to small business.  These posts have educated members about a variety of issues from business shopping carts to website HTML coding to search engine optimization to effective use of social media and much more.  The one thing that we have not allowed in this group is advertising.  We made a decision early in the process that the one thing that might kill this Yahoo Group was if we all started spamming each other, so the 20,000 messages in this group have been related only to business and topics that would assist our members.

That ended with NEO.  While hundreds of members have been able to refrain from spamming the Yahoo Group for almost fifteen years, Yahoo has decided to spam us on their own.  Intertwined within the educational and informational posts of our membership is spam from AdChoices.  For example, in between my post about QFLEA and social media this morning and a member post about how to handle a particular line of text/javascript, there is spam from Yahoo about there being no long-term benefits from Glucosamine.  Between a question about websites and mobile phones and commentary about a business editorial, we have spam about the top credit cards for 2014 for excellent credit.

Have the powers-that-be at Yahoo lost their minds?  Is it not bad enough that you’ve spammed our group with big picture ads?  (By the way, my favorite is the ad for the builder of the community in whose house I already live!!)  Must you muddy up a purely information process with advertising as well?  Your spam ads are unwelcome and detract from the efficiency of our Yahoo Group, though having said that, I know it means nothing to you.  I just find it particularly annoying that in addition to giving us a platform which is buggy, user-unfriendly, troublesome to edit, and a major step backwards in terms of usefulness, you’ve added spamming into our content.

It would appear that NEO is, if nothing else, aptly named.  It stands for what must be your new mantra, Never-ending Economic Opportunities!  In layman’s terms, Yahoo is now spamming all that is spammable!  Unfortunately, at the rate they are proceding, there will be fewer and fewer members on which to foist future failures.

Hasty Fixes to Groups Won’t Fix Revenue Woes

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Owl Money 2
Well, here we are in 2014, and it appears that the projected goals for Yahoo have not been met. There is little wonder why – they broke every one of their services to the point of being unusable. On Twitter recently (February 4, 2014), there were still people tweeting that their Yahoo mail was down and not working. Yahoo managed to break it again . . . and Flickr, too.

Do you know why Yahoo is such a mess? Because they rolled out a broken, buggy, untested program called NEO and forced it onto their users without warning.  They started with Yahoo Groups and turned us into guinea pigs as though we were due no consideration for our years of loyalty to Yahoo.  With total disregard they destroyed years of work put into the groups – archives, databases, and even accessibility were gone.

The media paid little attention to the protests of Groups users, but when Yahoo sabotaged Mail, the press was all over it.  Yahoo couldn’t deny the chaos they had created, and they quickly restored at least one of the favorite features (tabs) that they had eliminated.

Still the plight of Groups users was ignored, but we weren’t idle.  Yahoo’s Uservoice overflowed with requests for help, complaints about lost features, and pleas for the return to Classic Groups.  When that didn’t work, we took to contacting the media, advertisers, and stockholders – telling them what we were experiencing, asking for support, and advising them of plans to boycott. We also created this blog to collect relevant data, personal stories, news articles, resources, and comments in one location for anyone to see.

Finally, six months after the advent of NEO, we are beginning to see the true effect. Yahoo’s fourth quarter returns indicate that our efforts have not been in vain. Even though ad sales were up, revenue was down, and COO De Castro was fired by Mayer (with a generous – to say the least – severance deal). Despite Yahoo’s claim of increased traffic, maybe the advertisers and investors are finally seeing the validity of what we’ve been telling them.

BloombergTV2Full article at Bloomberg.com.

Now Yahoo is in a hurry to repair the damage and stop the exodus, but it isn’t working. Months ago Bonforte stated on Twitter that it would take at least two years to identify and fix all the bugs in Groups.

Jeff BonforteJeff Bonforte ‏@bonforte Jeff Bonforte ‏
@Mark__Oliver @Apacapacas it isn’t that easy. And we definitely do have ideas on where we want to take Groups in the next couple of years.
10:13 PM – 30 Oct 13 from Castro, San Francisco
(You can read the full transcript here.)

With the recent drop in revenue, investors are pressing for changes in Mayer’s management style.  The press is not only focusing on that, they’re also starting to take seriously the impact on Groups.  The result has been a push by Yahoo to make Groups functional again.  The problem is, the more they “fix” in haste, the more problems they actually cause. In an effort to conceal this latest fiasco, they’ve revised Uservoice so vote counts for requests/complaints are no longer shown.  Perhaps this is a ploy to minimize the effect when viewed by the media and general public.

Another favorite tactic of Yahoo is to close items and claim they have been fixed. In most instances, the problem still exists. They will also close requests as soon as they’ve been submitted, and they’ve changed the way requests are made and made it difficult to know what, if anything, has been done.  So far many of the things they claim are fixed still don’t work properly, if at all.

One of the problems we experienced with NEO is that all of the personalized home page photos were removed and replaced by arbitrary, irrelevant photos assigned by Yahoo (some of them actually offensive to certain cultures or religions).  When they recently returned the personalized photos to the home pages, they left the ones they had imposed on us and placed the original ones lower on the page, in a cropped format.  Below is an example of what a photo “restored” by NEO looks like now, although the original photo did not chop off the heads of the subjects (we did, however, obscure the subjects’ faces to protect their privacy).

NEOTT2

The bottom line is that Yahoo took services that worked – Groups, Mail, Finance, Sports, etc. – and destroyed them.  Groups lost functionality, Mail was down for days, and passwords have been compromised.  Yet they have adamantly refused to return to the Classic format, stating that it is no longer feasible, even though many users are still using that format. What we have repeatedly requested is a return to Classic at least until the new interface can be adequately tested and proven to provide the features on which we have relied for so long.  Is that really too much to ask?

How Yahoo’s Mistake Affected One Business Community

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Owl BusinessmanBy Charley Silverman

This is a story about how Yahoo’s horrible decision to force NEO into our lives has affected one small business community.  Though one story, it probably reflects the experience of many.

QFLEA.com is an online flea market comprised of over almost two hundred small business vendors selling goods and services on the internet.  Pre-NEO, we were closer to four hundred.  These small businesses are what we call the true “Mom and Pop” stores of the digital age, competing against the forces of the megasites and big box stores.

In 1999, each small business owner joined a discussion board called eGroups which was purchased in 2000 by Yahoo.  The purpose for this discussion board was to share common interests and provide mutual assistance.  Members could ask questions about various business processes and issues, with other members the providing answers.  All those questions and answers were saved in the group archives and became a gold mine of information.  Over the years, we also added various lists and databases and other data, all designed to support the small business member.

It worked very well for many years, until one morning in 2013 when we all realized that something was very wrong.  Our business community members suddenly found themselves with a new problem.  The group through which they had shared information since 1999 was suddenly looking different and acting very strangely.  Many were unable to access the group, the messages, or the databases.  Others were no longer able to even log in.  The new platform, NEO, had been forced on us with no announcement, no beta testing and no regard to the impact on literally millions of users.

As August turned to September, many of the QFLEA members were unable or unwilling to proceed through the nightmares that NEO caused.  Databases were no longer viewable, data was lost, and that gold mine of old messages was now tangled into something called “conversations.”  The ability to search through them for a topic was lost.  For a while, even the ability to edit a message was inoperative.  Members started to drop from QFLEA rather than put up with Yahoo’s disastrous decision.  Others who wanted to remain were unable to do so as re-registration required providing Yahoo with a cell phone number.  Some members don’t have cell phones and others were unwilling to provide that information.  Small businesses face many challenges in trying to compete with the big stores for shoppers.  For two members, this change was literally their “last straw” and they closed their businesses.

Now, almost six months after this awful change, activities through the QFLEA group have dropped significantly.  Searching for messages is still not possible.  Much of the functionality that the prior Classic Groups possessed is gone.  Two related Yahoo groups, the QFLEA-Cafe and the QFLEA-ShoppingNews, off-topic discussions and a shopper’s newsletter respectively, were closed in order to try to focus our attention on trying to fix the mess that Yahoo created in our QFLEA group.  We’re still working through this nightmare.  As a moderator, I cannot do many of the things that were important, including searching the activity logs, downloading a list of members and unbouncing members.

By the numbers, the impact is clear.  For those searching and finding QFLEA online, Yahoo has now fallen a distant third behind Google and Bing in how we are being found, and they are barely in third place as Ask.com is a close fourth.  The percentage of people finding us through Yahoo has dropped 31.5% since last year.

Yahoo’s overall revenue fell 6% in the last three months of 2013.  Prices for both online display ads and search ads declined in the fourth quarter.  The company’s shares were down 3.7%.  This is no surprise.  Anyone at Yahoo not realizing that NEO is the root cause of their loss of revenues and their growing customer-dissatisfaction is not paying attention.  How quickly they have forgotten “The New Coke.”  It took awhile, but eventually, three months after its disastrous introduction, company president Donald R. Keough acknowledged, “We did not understand the deep emotions of so many of our customers for Coca-Cola,” as the New Coke was removed from the shelves.

One can only hope that Marissa Mayer finds the courage that Mr. Keough showed and decides to “understand the deep emotions” of millions of Yahoo Group users who have been clear and outspoken in their desire to remove NEO from their lives!  If she doesn’t, she might share the same fate of a certain Decca record executive who in 1962 decided not to sign a band because he believed that “guitar bands were on the way out.”  The group he rejected?  Yes, it was The Beatles.

YAHOO HIDING STATS & LOSING GROUND

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spyowl

Foreword by Nightowl: This post was originally written on March 12, 2014. But it still explains in great detail what happened to us, how Yahoo tried to hide it, and how it never got fixed. Now that Verizon wants to delete us out of existence, I figured it was time to bring this back out into the light and see if anyone finally notices. We need to get Verizon to understand that we need more time to save our archives. There are more of us here than everyone thinks.  We are fighting to preserve our history!

Below is the story of how we got here and why.

What really lies beneath the brand new NEO interface Yahoo claims is so wonderful? Want the truth? Below that shiny appearance is disaster.

Classic lies in ruins with its archives in shambles, the photos scrambled, and the NEO  code they tried to replace it with so full of bugs we would need to hire a fleet of exterminators to remove them all.

And here’s the BEST part….it was created and released with all those bugs! Yessirree, Yahoo decided that maybe it would be a great idea to foist this new, non-beta-tested, buggy interface on a random selection of Classic Group Users…with no warning!

That was back in August of 2013. August 4th is the earliest date anyone has provided me for the Neo flip. And as usual, people took to the Yahoo Uservoice forum to comment.

One particular comment, we fondly call the “Top Topic” in Groups, was created on August 7, 2013. It had been the longest running topic we had going down there and the most voted on one.

Return Groups format to prior format that WORKS!

Below is a screen capture of the beginning phrases of that topic. Note the vote count box to the left. (This capture is from a user with a different computer and browser, so the fonts won’t exactly match the next image.)

58000topic

At its peak, it had over 400 pages of comments with multiple comments to a page. At one point, Yahoo either deleted or merged many comments together, and the number of pages decreased by about 30.

Why do I know this? Because I archived the entire topic to Word…by hand. Hours of painstaking capturing and pasting to preserve the truth about what was taking place because I suspected what would happen, and I was right. Yahoo would try and sweep us under the rug like we never existed.

As of January 28th, it had 58,678 votes. Then Yahoo ‘s 4th quarterly report came out, and what a coincidence, they decided after all this time not only to close this topic, but to also mark it “completed.” That is not only a lie, it’s completely laughable. Nothing is complete about NEO other than that it’s a complete disaster.

Below is some of what Yahoo doesn’t want you to know.

  • Since NEO was introduced in August, over 600,000 Yahoo Group users have deleted their groups and quit.
  • A large number of Yahoo Group users have been boycotting Yahoo advertisers since September 3rd, 2013. That’s also the date I mailed a letter with comments about users leaving and the boycott to De Castro & Mayer. And we’ve written the advertisers.
  • Many Group users have lost years of archives because NEO rendered them unaccessible. Some of what was lost was important business, or  research materials, or even memorials to loved ones.
  • And despite NEO being a failure, Yahoo has now started rolling it out overseas! French, Swedish, even German users are discovering that the years of work  stored in databases have been ruined. The accented characters and others have been turned into diamonds and other unrecognizable shapes.
  • A number of Group users can’t even get into their groups or the page loads for eternity and never finishes.
  • The disabled and blind cannot use the new NEO interface, it causes them physical reactions such as seizures and vertigo. Their equipment no longer works, so Yahoo Groups are no longer ADA qualified.
  • Yahoo Groups in NEO do not work on a Mobile phone. Even though that is what NEO was supposedly designed for, they simply DO NOT WORK.
    See image below:

Ugly Stick

The above is an image taken from one of my moderator’s cell phone. It shows a radio-based Yahoo group, only you can’t see very much of it, and Yahoo replaced the Home Page photo with a stock photo of their own and you can’t even easily tell what it is.

  • A number of groups have been overrun by spammers, because the moderation tools are broken. Many groups had to simply give up and close because they could not regulate the spammers.
  • For awhile, members were “held hostage.” Yahoo wasn’t allowing us to even delete a group or group member or even leave a group.

And there are MANY MANY more things described in this blog that Yahoo doesn’t want you to know. The above is just a few of them.

After Yahoo closed the top topic on January 28th, some users in my group became so angry they started creating duplicate topics and voting on those, but as fast as they created them, Yahoo declined them. The users were very determined though, and called it the Whack-A-Mole game.

NOTE:  I said declined. Not completed. That was really strange. If return to earlier format was deemed completed, it should apply to all of the same sort of comment. However, it did not…another indication that it isn’t really completed, it’s declined. See image below:

declined

So, in an effort to hide the actuality of the damage done to their Group Users, Yahoo decided on the evening of January 30th, 2014, to change the Uservoice topics so the votes no longer show a tally. Now they are simply ranked. Below is the same topic as above shown in this new format: (Again, with a slightly different font and spacing because it is from a different browser & computer.)

rank1topic

I can think of only one good reason to change complaint topics with 58,000+ votes to 1st ranked: to HIDE the number of complaining users. However, I have the original versions, so they won’t be able to do that.

Yahoo is trying to sweep us and this entire mess under the rug, but we’re not going. We are standing firm, telling the world what’s really happening, and we won’t be intimidated by Mayer & company.

We, the Yahoo Group users, have suffered this NEO abomination for what will be 6 months on February 4th, and it’s time someone did something about stopping it.

The instability and unpredictability of the NEO interface has made it a far more insecure platform where spammers can run rampant and moderation is a joke.

Yahoo’s use of outdated protocols and Java-based stream ads has done nothing but make the Groups platform more vulnerable, unstable, and unsafe.

NEO doesn’t even affect everyone the same way, which feels even more unnerving. Some can’t get in their groups at all or see archives; some can. And some are still in Classic; yes, it still works for some users.

Thank you for taking your time to read this, and I hope that someone will investigate this and tell our story. Yahoo needs to be held accountable for the unthinkable treatment they have been showing one of their most loyal user bases.

Yahoo, undo this disaster. Return us back to Classic Groups. Give the mail users their Classic Mail.  Fix the other services that you have ruined for Finance, Sports and others.

Stop this nonsense now, admit that NEO is a failure, and you might stop the growing exodus from your company, but only if you hurry…because soon it will be too late.

Nightowl >8#

Overrun with SPAM!

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spamowl

THE SPAM TAKEOVER

Below is a message from Joe, who has been very active in my group and has been making every effort to combat the spam that threatened to overrun Yahoo Groups once NEO was implemented.

NEO broke the moderation tools so badly that we were unable to moderate members and messages or to preview things. Some group owners simply gave up and fled, while the spammers who have overtaken the groups are still there today.

I’ll let you hear it from Joe himself:

Below is the original (slightly edited) post by Joe in the Yahoo Groups Uservoice, posted on August 30, 2013.

*********************************
Hey gang

I created a new thread in yahoo feedback about ne0. please send this to your groups every vote counts.

Yahoo groups now open to pedos and spammers

Since group owners/moderators cannot preview pics/vids in pending messages, or preview pending members joining comments, there is no way to ban pedos and spammers.

Once they are already in the group and their posts have already gotten sent out then you can ID them.

I have been a group owner/moderator for over 10 years but with NEO I cannot control what goes on and gets sent out in my groups or who joins anymore.

You might need to cut and paste the link below but every vote counts.
Joe

The original URL that was posted in the Uservoice is no longer a working URL.

Joe continues:

LESS THAN 24 HOURS LATER it was merged with this one.  I think my title got someone’s attention.

It had 451 votes in less than 24 hours when they merged it.
See forwarded message below:
—- Forwarded Message —–
From: Yahoo! <no-reply@yahoo.uservoice.com>
To: jstarest2@…
Sent: Saturday, August 31, 2013 11:46 AM
Subject: yahoo.uservoice.com
Your idea has been merged: ‘yahoo groups now open to pe…’
yahoo.uservoice.com
Idea merged
An idea you voted for (yahoo groups now open to pedos and spammers) has been merged with a similar idea:
451 votes
Planned

Below is someone else’s topic that it was merged with. It was posted in US Groups » Other groups features.

Unable to edit messages before approving

The new neo rollout is the absolute WORST idea yahoo has ever come up with.

One of the worst features is that now on the owner preview page, we can’t see if there are any pending messages or members. So we have to physically go to each group we manage, every day, click that homepage link just to see if there is anything pending. It is a HUGE amount of time wasted for us. The old way was better.

We can no longer edit posts? That is crazy talk. With thousands of members who refuse to trim messages, this was a very valuable tool for group owners.

Facebook groups and Google groups are becoming all too popular in this day and time. And this new roll out will effectively kill that yahoogroups, based on poor useability alone.

You should have left well enough alone. The format has been working great for years.

Sometimes change is NOT better.
*******************************

So there you have it. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Nightowl >8#

Yahoo Is Tumbling Toward Disaster

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tumblingowl

You know, it’s days like this that really make me wonder what kind of Kool-Aid the Yahoo execs are drinking because there is no rhyme or reason to their behavior of today – other than to hide everything from the press, of course.  But don’t worry, because I make sure that doesn’t happen.

Today, two major things happened at about the same time. First, Yahoo reported their 4th quarterly earnings, and they weren’t up to snuff.

Second, one of the longest-running, most active, and highest voted topic in the Groups Uservoice was marked completed and moved.

Return groups format to prior format that WORKS!

Does this topic sound familiar? If you’ve been on here reading, you’ll remember that it is the one that was first posted August 7, 2013, by Nedra, the person showcased in the first part of this post below:

NEO VS CLASSIC: A PICTORIAL VIEW

To have moved this to the Completed section of Uservoice is absolutely ridiculous. The issue is nowhere near completed, and if you check in Uservoice under “declined,” you’ll find a number of similar topics that have been hidden there. So why mark this one completed? They want the press to believe it has been. No other explanation.

BTW, if you want to read that hidden, marked completed topic, go here.

Between that and Jeff Bonforte’s post on Tumblr today, all they have done is send more users fleeing faster than you can say “Abandon ship,” and I’m not having much luck slowing that exodus.

So let’s look at Mr. Bonforte’s tumblr post and dissect it a bit, shall we?

It’s at this link, if you want to read it for yourself.

I’m going to take pieces of it and refute it here because there isn’t any way to comment on it in there.

So here we go.

The Future of Yahoo Groups
By  Jeff Bonforte, SVP, Communications

Jeff wrote:>>Last year, Yahoo released a new Yahoo Groups.  Our goal was to make the experience more enjoyable, and modern, for everyone.<<

Absolutely nothing about NEO has been enjoyable. It’s been a headache day after day and has stressed people to the point of causing physical harm to them. Goal failed.

Jeff wrote:>>While many of you liked the new Groups, others felt differently.<<

Show me 100 Groups users who like NEO Groups. Show me 75. Show me 50. Show me 25. Heck, show me 10! And that doesn’t mean those that you plant everywhere to claim they are great. Groups is so broken across the board, it’s hard to imagine it working well for anyone.

Jeff wrote:>>Many of you asked why we needed to change Groups at all….Regarding the infrastructure, Groups hadn’t been updated in 12+ years. …The previous platform was rapidly aging and it urgently needed an upgrade to ensure future stability.<<

This statement has been debated for months, and Classic still runs on many many platforms. There are even still users in the USA on Classic. It is not falling apart. It is not crumbling into dust. It would hold up for us to revert back to until they make something comparable that WORKS. NEO does not.

Jeff wrote:>>…by moving Groups onto Yahoo’s current platforms, we’ve been able to improve the speed and reliability of the service which means a better experience for you.<<

Who is he trying to convince? Speed is down so dramatically, it takes hours to do what we could do in ten minutes. Reliability? Sure, if you want the reliability that the group page will take forever to load, not load at all, or give you happy error messages.

Jeff wrote:>>(As one example, the page load times have decreased substantially on the new infrastructure.)<<

Uh….for WHOM? My page load times are SLOW. Sometimes they don’t load at all. Sometimes they load but give me an error. I didn’t write new lyrics to the tune from Rawhide below, for nothing!

Loading, Loading, Loading, Keep Those Pages Loading, Loading, Loading, Loading, YAHOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Jeff wrote:>>For instance, Groups didn’t perform optimally on smartphones and tablets, which we know is important to a lot of you.<<

Guess what, Groups performs even WORSE on Smartphones now. Completely useless. And tablets? Don’t even try it; you can’t even get to the controls. NEO is a mobile failure, and Yahoo would be smarter than a smartphone if they’d just admit it.

Jeff wrote:>>We’re now in a better position to make Groups quicker and easier to use while you’re on the go. <<

Note the words, “to make.”  Jeff Bonforte admitted to us in the Tweetfest that it would probably be two more years before their vision would be realized and completed. In other words, two more years of buggy broken NEO. No one plans to wait that long, certainly not me.

To get to the Tweetfest link, go here.

Jeff wrote:>>We truly appreciate all of your feedback and we will continue to do our best to address it as quickly as possible. As a matter of fact, thanks to many of you and your comments, we’ve made hundreds of changes since the launch. <<

We have now resolved 1085 bugs including 20 “major impact” ones since release of new Groups.   12:06 PM – 5 Nov 2013

As Jeff states,  NEO Groups  started with 1085+ bugs, and what they actually did was fix bugs they caused or bring back features they took away or broke, and after 5 months, the product is still  buggy and unreliable.

The databases are broken and unusable, many users can’t retrieve their archives, and some users can’t even get into their groups or their groups are just plain missing.

It’s not an accurate statement to claim the changes were upgrades. The whole mess was a downgrade, and they’ve been tweaking it trying to fix it ever since, all while we users have been suffering through whatever new hell they devise for us that day.

Jeff wrote:>>I want to clearly state that the new Groups is here to stay, but our commitment is to continue to partner with all of you to make it as good as it can be.<<

There is no partnership with Bonforte or Yahoo. I asked Jeff once to show us good faith by removing TWO statements that cause intense fury when read by users. One was in uservoice, and hasn’t been removed. That one said:

“We are working hard to make this a product you will love more than you hate change.”

Talk about a condescending comment, and it was repeated over and over and over and over.  We don’t hate change; we hate broken usability and losing our data, our groups, and our connections we’ve had for years. And we have lost them.

The other comment was on the Groups page:

Welcome to the new Yahoo Groups. We’ve improved your Yahoo Groups experience. Check out what’s new:

Improved our Yahoo Groups Experience? Nope. Not even a little. Destroyed it, ruined it, smashed our lives into pieces, yes. Improved? No. Yet Jeff couldn’t even get TWO phrases removed to show good faith that Yahoo was listening.

Jeff wrote:>>If you have questions you’d like to raise to me and the Groups product team, please visit the Groups Town hall .<<

This statement is interesting because, you see, earlier it said “Please join the Groups Townhall,” with join being the operative word.

Shal tried to view the Townhall group, and he first got this:

townhallblank

He explains some things about this image here.

Below is some explanation in an exchange between myself and Shal from my group:

Shal wrote:>>to be fair Jeff said to “visit”, not “join”,<<

Yes, until I called Bonforte on it on Twitter,  as well as told some of the media about it there, and then miraculously, it changed! Imagine that!

Shal wrote:>>and the group does have its Conversations open to non-members (“Conversations”, in that case, being a misnomer, as only moderators can post). The part they don’t understand is that by closing the group they prevent people from signing up to receive their town hall postings by email. Which makes the group no more useful than their Tumblr blog: out of sight, out of mind. Worse in fact, unless they add a link to it in the left column.<<

So here is my question, if NEO is so great, let everyone join the group and use it as a group. No, they can’t possibly set it up right for that. Read on…

Shal wrote:>>Another weird thing is that rather than simply allow people to post to groupstownhall, and use message moderation to select the topics to post, they created a companion group – askgroups – which has no visible content but allows non-members to post. So they’ll be collecting questions in one group, and answering them in the other. Huh?<<

Does that even remotely make sense to anyone? Shal tries to offer a reason:

Shal wrote:>>I can think of a couple reasons they might do that. One would be so that they can keep a private archive of all the questions asked, including the ones they aren’t ready to answer (now or ever). Another is that it removes the two-week time limit: they can visit as infrequently as they wish without concern that the questions would be auto-deleted from the pending queue.

But the big downside of this approach is that the “Post Message” link on the groupstownhall info page is probably ineffective: that page says only members may post. <<

You can read Shal’s post in it’s entirety here.

Okay, so Jeff (or Yahoo) creates a group, Town Hall, where we are directed to ask questions via e-mail, but we can’t post directly in it.

And the questions are collected by e-mail in a group Shal says exists, that we can’t read. When we went looking for this group, we tried to recreate the URL using another group’s URL and replacing the name, and we got this:

Yahoo AskGroups

Then Shal gave us a new link that gives us this:

Yahoo 404

He says that it appears to be a closed group and that the questions are collected there and then answered in Town Hall, so we’ll only see the questions that are selected by them to answer.

And no one can subscribe by e-mail, which is the main way many people use Groups to start with.

If the whole point was to show us how great Neo groups are, they should run it like an actual group, and let us join & subscribe to e-mail.

This smacks to me of a glorified Uservoice, where now we have to visit not one, but THREE sites to use it. Tumblr, Groups Town Hall, and Ask Groups, thus making more traffic to Yahoo and still getting us ZERO results.

This Owl won’t be giving them that traffic. It’s just going to wind up being another place to go and get completely ignored while giving users false hope that Yahoo cares.

I completely understand why Jeff’s post and the closing of the Uservoice topic sent users fleeing all over again, why it fired up the boycott against ads on Yahoo even hotter, and why users are simply starting to no longer trust Yahoo.

Yahoo simply does not really care.
Sad…but inevitably true.

Nightowl >8#