How Forum Posts are Reposted to YahooGroups and Groups.io

A series of posts and videos explaining how to use the forum.
Post Reply
User avatar
Peter Walker
Site Admin
Posts: 148
Joined: Fri Nov 15, 2019 11:00 pm
Has thanked: 9 times
Been thanked: 1 time
Contact:

How Forum Posts are Reposted to YahooGroups and Groups.io

Post by Peter Walker »

As the Minutus Group is still in transition to the Minutus Forum, there is still some confusion as to what list does what. The purpose of this post is to explain how each of the three locations the Minutus group is currently using, has been allocated.

The Minutus Forum
The Minutus Forum is the place where your archives have been restored and designed to be the place the group is to move to for all future discussions. It is a modern forum based system designed to be used on the website, itself. It provides a rich environment with easy access to your archives and allows topics to be sorted under a number of categories. It is possible to post messages, images, videos and more as well as upload attachments, etc. All members already have an account on the forum and just need to login.
It is located at: https://minutus.forums.group/

Messages posted on the Minutus Forum are reposted as follows:
  1. Each new post is automatically posted immediately to minutus@groups.io (“Topic reply notification” that contains the full text of the post) and the plan is to leave it like that in future. Anyone who wants to receive each forum post individually, just needs to be a member of this group: https://rifegroup.groups.io/g/Minutus/
  2. Once a day, a Daily Digest of the forum posts is posted to minutus@yahoogroups.com – this ensures that everyone is kept up do date on those forum posts. 
The Minutus YahooGroup
The Minutus YahooGroup is the original group where the Minutus Group came together and discussed for about 20 years. As a mailing list, it was possible to post new messages online and via email. It consisted of the message archives (that were difficult to use), as well as Files and Photo upload areas. In December 2019, Yahoo removed the archives (messages, files, photos, links, etc.) as well as the ability to post online. As messages are no longer stored, the digest feature was also removed and all that is left is the ability to make posts via email that are then distributed via email to everyone on the list. The YahooGroup has become unmanageable and difficult to control. 
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/minutus

Messages posted to minutus@yahoogroups.com are currently being automatically reposted to Minutus@rifegroup.groups.io to preserve the posts, as YahooGroups no longer has an archive of its own. This also means that the Daily Digest is also being reposted there by default (via the YahooGroup) as well. The plan is however to only use this YahooGroup to repost the Daily Digest and new posts should be made exclusively on the forum. As members seem to be shy of posting on the forum, or have just not yet worked out how to login and post there, some discussions have been taking place on Minutus@rifegroup.groups.io, in the past few days. Once people have got used to only posting on the forum, the redirect to groups.io can be stopped so that the Daily Digest is them only sent out via the YahooGroups and the individual posts via the groups.io list. This means that anyone who is a member of both the YahooGroup and groups.io, will receive each post sent to the YahooGroup, twice. To avoid double posts, make new posts on the forum – that is the best place. It is still possible to prevent members from posting to the YahooGroup and that may be necessary in order to better organize the group.

Minutus at groups.io
This group was setup originally as a replacement for the YahooGroup and a place to migrate the messages and members to. Unfortunately, the Minutus group were too late to have the YahooGroup's archives migrated there and all that remained was the ability to invite the members of the YahooGroup and for new discussions to be held there. Unfortunately, a direct add of all members was not possible for technical reasons and only about 100 members followed the invitation to join that group. After it became obvious that discussions of the merits of vaccinations were banned by the owners of the groups.io platform, the request was made to find an alternative home for the Minutus group. The only method available to restore the archived and members in one place was as a forum and that was the idea for the birth of the new forums.group platform. Creating the new forum structure and the necessary procedures to migrate the existing data to the new forum took months until the forum could finally open at Easter 2020. 
https://rifegroup.groups.io/g/Minutus

Those who make posts to Minutus@rifegroup.groups.io will reach members of that list, only. Those posts are not reposted anywhere else. That list is now meant for those wanting individual posts from the Minutus Forum and such posts are already being sent there with the title: "New topic notification" although it is planned to change the structure of those messages to closer resemble an email. These notifications contain the topic name and message of the relevant post plus a link to the forum where the post was originally made.

Request to Convert the Forum into a Mailing List.
Now a request has been made to make it possible to not only receive new posts via email, but also to be able to reply and make new posts via email as well, as some people do not want to have to visit the forum or use the app to make posts. They basically want to use the forum as if it were a mailing list like YahooGroups. I can understand this wish as people are used to receiving new posts via email and simply replying via email as well instead of clicking on a link in the email to post online. The first part of this wish has been fulfilled by posting each new message to groups.io, thereby giving us a reason to maintain that group into the future for that purpose – at least for now. 

Forums are not designed to work as mailing lists. The open source phpBB forum system (used by the Minutus Forum) is used by hundreds of thousands of forums worldwide with millions of members in all those forums and the phpBB system has been around since June 2000, yet nobody has developed and released a mechanism for these forums to accept new posts via email. A forum is NOT a mailing list and to try to make it into one is like trying to turn every theatre into a TV station. It is just not how these things are designed to work. All the action happens on the forum, not spread around the world in in-boxes where you do not have access to the rich archives and many other functions a forum can provide over a simple mailing list. All the same, you made the request for this functionality and I have asked our programmer to investigate what it would cost to add the functionality to the forum so that it is possible for members to reply via email to the forum and for those posts to be automatically posted on the forum. Luckily, the programmer had already programmed something similar for another forum software and he says that code could be re-purposed for this.

He has now told me that he is prepared to write the code for 250 € (about $270) so if you want that functionality, instead of just posting on the forum or in the app, as it is designed for, then that is what it would cost to make it possible. If you can raise these funds for this feature, it can be implemented. It is up to you as a group. The forum is fully functional now and if you were prepared to post on the forum or in the app instead of via email, this additional software would not be needed. 

There are also additional costs for me though this change as well. At the moment, the costs for redistributing each mail via YahooGroups and groups.io is basically nothing. With this change, it will most likely be necessary to send you each messages directly from the forum and I as I have to pay Amazon for redistributing all those emails, it would considerably increase my costs for running this forum because then, every time someone makes a post, instead of one email being sent to the YahooGroups and groups.io for redistribution, now thousands of emails will have to be sent out individually for each post.  

So anyway, that is the deal and it is now up to you all to decide if you still want that functionality or not. The only gain is to be able to reply via your email account instead of clicking on a link in an email and then replying just as easily on the forum.
See also the video I released today, that shows how easy it is to post on the forum itself.



https://youtu.be/NNWnIBy6Od0
 
 
 
 


Post Reply

Return to “How To Use the Forum”