Hi Cal:
You have asked a great question, in that it is about an issue that many owners of groups at Yahoo Groups are likely facing. It is also one that I faced when I first learned of the impending massive downscaling/crippling of Yahoo Groups (YG), since I owned about 34 list groups at Yahoo Groups, some of them dating back to they year 2000, when they were hosted at Egroups a Yahoo Groups legacy predecessor which was absorbed by Yahoo in late 2000 and morphed into Yahoo Groups. BTW, Egroups, about one year prior to its purchase by Yahoo, had merged with OneList, a pioneering email list group service that had been, in fact, created by Mark Fletcher, who is the founder of Groups.io (information in this section was updated/corrected thanks to a clarification note from a moderator).?
In my case, my groups at YG ranged in size from 9 members to about 3,000 members apiece, with a median membership count of around 175 members. Luckily, a number of these groups covered similarly-themed-topics that could easily be condensed or combined into one larger group. I was also able to ascertain fairly quickly that Groups.io allows import of more than one Yahoo group into a single Premium group at Groups.io, without incurring any extra charges beyond the Premium yearly fee for that Groups.io group.
So, I ultimately chose to do the following:
1) to abandon about 15 of my smaller or lesser-used groups at Yahoo Groups, and to import the remaining 19 to a somewhat smaller number of groups here at Groups.io.
2) to create 7 Premium groups here at Groups.io, and to transfer into them the content of the 19 of my list groups at Yahoo Groups that I chose to continue; some of my Groups.io groups received a transfer of only one group from YG, while others received transfers of members and message archives from anywhere from two to six Yahoo Groups. Now, I am aware that many folks here at Groups.io who do that choose to create two or more suitably-named subgroups under their Groups.io group, and to transfer different groups from YG into different subgroups under the same group (of course, in such cases, while the relevant imported messages and files are stored under the subgroup, the primary membership list must be stored? under the main parent group). In my case, I elected not to bother with creating subgroups, and instead, in the cases where I was transferring multiple groups from YG into a single Groups.io group, I chose to import each of those YG groups into the main group here at Groups.io.
Now, I must also add here that I always believe in fairly supporting the various services that I use, and in helping to ensure that the business/service remains sustainable for many years to come. And, in this case, I had created each of my seven new groups here at Groups.io before Oct. 22, and thus I had paid only a $110 yearly fee for each Premium group; in other words, I created all of them before Groups,io raised the yearly fee for a new Premium group to $220 per year to more fairly cover the costs of handling all of the transfers.
So, since I was transferring a total of 19 YG groups to my seven Groups.io groups, my intuition/inner guidance nudged me and advised me that it would be a very good idea to find a way to throw some extra financial support at Groups,io to help to compensate them more fairly for all of the work involved in those 19 transfers, particularly since I had paid only $110 per group for the Premium yearly fee. At that point in time, Groups,io had already successfully completed the transfer of three of my YG groups to my Groups.io groups, with about 16 more waiting in the queue, and so I chose to pay the $200 fee for each of five (l later increased the count to seven) of my still-in-the-queue transfers to be expedited.?
I hope that this information that I have shared proves helpful!?
In closing, I must take a moment to say that I very much appreciate Groups.io -- I feel that it is a great service, and it manages to host list groups in a way that is far more robust, efficient, effective, versatile and friendly than the long-neglected Yahoo Groups and Google Groups services have ever managed to offer! I also appreciate the massive amount of work that Mark and his staff have been putting into handling the unexpected and unprecedented and ever-increasing number of requests for transfers from YG since Verizon announced the upcoming near-demise of Yahoo Groups on Oct. 16.?
Vinny Pinto