Things started to go badly haywire for me in my Yahoo group a little over two years ago. I was in Shal's Yahoo GMF group then, and I think I can lay claim to "most vocal complainer" - which shows what a tough customer I am and, I think, lends more credence to my perception of groups.io's high quality. I was so vocal in my complaints that I think the reason Shal told me about groups.io was mainly to get me to shut up...Yahoo was, unbelievably, getting worse and worse by the day. A former software engineer, I'd never seen such a piece of - can I say this? - such an unbelievable piece of shit software or such unbelievable lack of support. It was jaw-dropping then, and it's even more jaw-dropping now.
So I made a test group and sounded out my group members. I was particularly concerned about our specialist veterinarian member who is a mainstay of our group, and whether he would stay if we made the move. But I decided to take a chance. I had to get out of Yahoo.?The transfer was seamless except for one person who, in an attempt to be helpful, emailed her "send me a link to login" email to another person, causing them to inadvertently log in to her account. We were (at that point) very small, and everyone knew each other, so there was laughter all around. That was literally the only glitch.?It?turned out that everyone who accessed the group strictly by email hardly even noticed the move. In fact, I find out every so often that some of them think we're still in Yahoo. I'd prepared everyone for Armageddon for over month in advance and the move was profoundly anticlimactic. People just continued to receive and answer emails.?I was also really concerned at first that potential new members would have trouble finding us after moving out of the Yahoo group community and into what I feared would be the "backwater" of groups.io, but it turned out to be the opposite. We grew much more rapidly after the move than before.
After the move, everything started to run smoothly. People were finding us more easily than before and we grew more rapidly. And, of course there were all the new and amazing features - some of which, unbelievably, I requested from Mark myself, and he responded and added them! The slightest problem, I email Mark and he responds immediately. This was after the experience in Yahoo groups where nobody responds, ever. It was like Waiting for Godot over there. Now I've become spoiled. I have the luxury of complaining about the slightest little detail here that goes wrong, and drumming my fingertips with impatience while Mark has the audacity to take more than an hour or so to fix them lol.
I'm a fan, and I don't worry about the future.?
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J
