On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 10:10 PM, Kenny Williams wrote:

As the new members requested membership, I manually approved them, but a few are now showing "NC" (not confirmed) on the members list.

Kenny; your manually approved them above is a function of your running a Restricted Group wherein subscribers have to be approved rather than just "joining". Do you use the "Pending Subscription" message requirement? I suspect not because I hope you would have mentioned it.

The simple solution to this is not to approve applicants until they have confirmed their request to join by sending the reply requested by Groups.io. Do you "approve" by email? I suspect that you do but IIRC there is no clue in the email notification that the applicant has yet to confirm their request to join; IMHO it is much better to approve from the Pending Approval list because any NC flag is clearly visible, and if there is a flag against any given application you can just leave the application sitting there until such time as it is cleared by Groups.io receiving the requested confirmation. (Ditto a reply being received by you to a Pending Subscription message) If no action is taken then the application will lapse after 14 days and will vanish; if you wish you can force a resend of the Confirmation Email.

By leaving incomplete applications in the pending tray you can prevent NC flags appearing at random in your Members list. As has been pointed out "members" thus flagged can neither post nor receive group messages so there is no useful purpose being served by their actually being members.

One query... "manual" approval? AFAIK for a Restricted Group there is no "non - manual" way. :)

Chris

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 09:36 AM, ray_r.rm wrote:

I do not want to lose these "members" because from another source they have useful info,
but it appears that there is nothing I can do about it.

In this context you could try deleting the NC subscription and send the same address an invitation to your group. If the recipient responds to the invitation, this achieves the same objective as the confirmation email, and the account doesn't land in NC status.

If he still doesn't respond, it's unfortunate, but at least your member list won't be cluttered with people who are effectively non-members. It would be my preference that NC accounts have their own entry in the blue pull-down menu; or failing that, land among the subscriptions in the Pending list. Unfortunately, such suggestions in beta haven't gotten much traction.

Bruce

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 09:36 AM, ray_r.rm wrote:

I do not want to lose these "members" because from another source they have useful info,
but it appears that there is nothing I can do about it. Even though it is their own fault for being NC, how can
I help them recover?

Richard -- Many folks join groups because they want to receive messages, and aren't interested in posting. When they subsequently get an "unsolicited" email saying they have to reply, they may balk without even reading it carefully. Most of the posts that I receive in the course of a day that say something like that are indeed some kind of spam, so this behavior is understandable. I've met with more success with such recalcitrant folks by sending them an explanation -- telling them to look for it and what they need to do -- before resending the confirmation email. But even that might not work if the recipient doesn't know you.

Having said all that, please also consider the possibility that they could have changed their mind, or forgotten that they requested a subscription, or someone else signed them up via "Join This Group," and so on. The last sentence of the confirmation email says "If you did not request - or do not want - a subscription to this group, please accept our apologies and ignore this message." There's a reason why it says that.

Regards,
Bruce

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 02:24 AM, Art Kocsis wrote:

How does one insert tabs or specify a fixed point font on a Wiki page?
All of the eleven available fonts are proportional and trying to insert tabs
just changes fields.

In essence, I want to display a two column table and left align the second column.

This is tricky on every forum on every forum site I've ever been on--not just Groups.io or their Wiki.

As Shal noted, the best solution (if you have the skill) is to use an HTML table. Here is the second-best solution.

Intuitively, you would think that you could simply switch the font to a monospaced (fixed-pitch) font like Courier or Lucida Console and use spaces to line things up. That works in word processors like Word. Unfortunately, the HTML standard defines "whitespace" as spaces, tabs, newlines (CR, LF, or CRLF). It states that any string of whitespace shall be condensed to a single character of whitespace when rendering. So even if you carefully save a table that's padded with spaces for alignment, and it's delivered to the viewer that way, his browser betrays you and collapses it to a single space.

So the only option is to use some non-whitespace character for some of the padding, never using two whitespace symbols in sequence. Here's a bogus table, where I'm trying a few different padding options with Courier.

Column A? ?Column B
aa _______ bbbbb
aaaa ..... bbb
aaaaa _ _ _bbbbbb
a _ _ _ _ _bbbb
aa . . . . bbbbb

I think I like the solid underscores and dots better than the dashed versions, but all of these seem to work.

Larry

开云体育

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 09:25 AM, WBennett wrote:

I had a pending member, he responded to the questionnaire which goes out on application. I emailed him privately for clarification of some points and a few minutes later, I got the message from groups.io that he had left the group.

Why did I get that message when he hadn’t even been approved?

He must have balked at something you asked him...many folks are loath to give out information.

As for the notification, members in pending status are nonetheless members, and this notification is sent so you know that he left of his own accord. The alternative -- silently disappearing without leaving you with any understanding of what happened -- strikes me as undesirable.

Regards,
Bruce

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On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 03:05 AM, Shal Farley wrote:

What it does here:
/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Moving-to-Groups.io

Art, I think Shal meant:
/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/How-to-put-a-Table-of-Contents-on-a-Wiki-page

be careful that the TOC script isn’t formatted as a heading. It goes whacky and of course there’s no indicator the text is a heading if the size is consistent in your page. It drove me NUTS until I realized that I had inserted the TOC script into an already formatted area. ?

Ordinary free group with about 700 members.

If they joined a year ago and are not getting any messages it seems that they might inquire.
I clicked on the name ans scrolled down, then clicked on send confirmation notice.
It is too soon to tell if any responded.
How would I, as Owner, know that they confirmed?
I expect the "NC" would just disappear.
I invited one and found that he is already a member.
All of them have the first post moderated and have the "NM" note.
Another one, I verified that his e-mail is correct, from another source and that he is
involved in the activity this Group is focused on.

I do not want to lose these "members" because from another source they have useful info,
but it appears that there is nothing I can do about it. Even though it is their own fault for being NC, how can
I help them recover?

Thanks,
Richard

I think the highest number I heard of in the queue was just over 1000. Then
he improved the import software and everything went much quicker.

-Ken Cameron, Member JMRI Dev Team
www.jmri.org
www.fingerlakeslivesteamers.org
www.cnymod.org
www.syracusemodelrr.org

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Bruce,

I would agree.? There are groups still in YG that have only waken up to the fact YG is going DARK in the past week.? We've seen a few post here with the manual PGO, YG download MBOX, and even Lena's scripts.?

Should it be true for YG to still allow group downloads till the end of Jan 2020, the game is still on, just the brunt force like the 3300+ in short time order isn't there.? Anywhere from several dozen to another few hundred groups could be in the wings.

We are now looking at T-minus 1-day-ish before all goes DARK on YG.

BMaverick

?Compared to Yahoo, this is heaven.
??????????????????????????????????? Zapple100

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 04:49 AM, Art Kocsis wrote:

This is the way all groups should be.

IMHO there is no one-size-fits-all formula; it is for individual group owners to determine what works best for them and their group(s).

?During that time we never had one single incidence of SPAM being posted.

It isn't necessarily just spam that can be a problem. Some subscribers seem unable to be able to trim their posts so moderation can be an effective way of cutting down the quantity of clutter that can accumulate by over - quoting. Others have unduly long signature blocks that are OK occasionally but tend to add to the clutter. The moderators on this group are quite effective in keeping this under control!

It is quite an unnecessary burden and causes unnecessary delays to require moderation of first time posts for groups such as ours.

Then you should perhaps count yourself as very lucky; I would argue that it is a regrettable necessity on occasions; yes it causes delays but patience is a virtue. I certainly wouldn't argue that moderation is something that group owners should avoid; group owners have to work within the world as they find it rather than the world as it should be.

Chris

PS: I don't know where on the globe you reside; I am in the UK where moderation delays on this group can be quite long because all the mods are on the other side of the Atlantic with a 6 - 8 hour time difference. One can get used to it quite easily...

Thanks, John.

I had looked at that page a few weeks ago, but shied away from it, because I dislike Chrome so much. But I'm trying to do exactly what you're describing, salvaging as much as I can, even if it's in pieces.

I hit a wall with both PG Offline and the Chrome application, so I'm in a bit of an uncomfortable holding pattern at the moment, considering the looming deadline.

With PGO I get a perpetual login error.

And with the Yahoo Messages Application I get "Failed to load extension - Manifest file is missing or unreadable - Could not load manifest". I do see a JSON file named manifest in the folder, but have no idea if's readable. I wonder if I followed the instructions about what to do with the zip file correctly. The instructions talk about creating a directory and copying the files there, and I don't think I know what that means. I figured I was just supposed to unzip it, and then point Chrome at the unzipped folder, and that's what I did.

Any insight you might have acquired while you got it to work?

In the meantime I'm going to request another batch of Yahoo data, and hope there are additional puzzle pieces. Yahoo sent out a mailing that we can request our date until Saturday night 11:59pm PACIFIC, and that they won't delete the archives until they've fulfilled the last open requests. I'm hoping that requesting more data is a way to extend the archives just a bit longer, to buy time to download the rest.

Isis

Thank you, Frances.

That was easy! If only all questions had such simple answers.... ;)

Isis

Art,

How does one insert tabs or specify a fixed point font on a Wiki page?

The wiki lacks tables or tabbed columns. You could probably use the <> Source Code editor to create a table in HTML code.

Second question is what exactly is the "Table of Contents" supposed to
do?

What it does here:
/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Moving-to-Groups.io

The Wiki just discusses how to enter it but does not contain any info
on how to populate it or what auto update is supposed to do.

You populate it by using Heading 1, Heading 2, ... from the Format drop-list. Make sure your first use of such a format is after the TOC insertion, and make sure it is Heading 1. Else confusion will ensue.

Shal


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John,

Somehow, 1 or two email addresses have special characters at the
end of them (see photo).

That's the unicode replacement character - displayed when the unicode value is invalid.

When I edit the email, delete the special characters, then try to Save
- I get the warning "That email address is already registered."
...
- Is this a bug?

Probably the user has already registered their address with the correct spelling.

I'd try Direct Adding those users with the correct spelling. If you end up with subscriptions under both spellings delete the incorrect one.

Shal


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Maria,

Is there any way that we can restrict members from exporting a
database that has been set up by a moderator / owner ?

Not without blocking them from reading the database. You can do that for all databases by changing the group setting, as Gerald suggested, or you can do that by editing a specific database's properties ("View Table").

If not can this be put on a Wish List ?

The official "suggestion box" is the beta group:


Or if you run a Premium group the new tracking system:


Shal


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Richard,

Still totally confused.

Even after reading the wiki page?
/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Status-Badges-in-the-Members-List

I think it goes through the various cases of when confirmation is required and when it is not.

No one has ever mentioned having to confirm.

Why would they?

I verified that their address was valid from another source that is
verifiable.

If your group is on a Premium plan you can manually confirm them. Otherwise they must confirm their address on their own.

No one has ever sent a message to me saying they do not get messages.

Members often don't communicate when they have problems. Or might not realize they should be expecting messages.

Shal


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