From: Shal Farley <shals2nd@...>
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2021 09:06:11 CET

We will need to take this to beta , in due time when Mark isn't too busy

1) I think it has had a round or two there, and 2) Mark will never be not too busy. ;-)

yeah, but if we refine the proposal here we may prevent a huge thread on <beta>

As it would be quite difficult for Mark&co to figure out who is dead,
maybe just allow succession-requests no sooner than when the original
owner has not been active in any group for 2 or 3 months, ...

I think we need to be able to propose something that > works without intervention by Groups.io support.

I don't think that it's possible to make that "watertight"

But you got me thinking...
What about:
1) Add an "Owner Succession" panel to each moderator's page, just below the Moderator Permissions panel.

Sure

This panel would be accessible
only by owners, not by any moderators.
2) In this panel place a checkbox for "Promote this moderator to owner in the event of absence of any owner.

I'm missing an adjective before "absence".. maybe "longterm" or "permanent"

maybe make it possible to appoint a MEMBER to take over

Place a second control to define
how long an absence triggers succession.
For this purpose I'd define absence as being no activity by any owner's account (either web activity or inbound email).

delete the word "inbound"

3) In the event that any owner or any moderator tagged for succession is individually absent (as defined above) send a notification (Web/Email) to all Owners indicating who is absent and that the chain of succession may need review.

first email the absent owner, if (s)he doesn't react, notify the moderator(s) or spare owner

Pros:
o Covers both single owner or multiple owner initial conditions.

What problem is there to be solved when you have multiple owners?

o Allows the owner(s) to establish a chain of succession (first Alice, then Bob, then Charlie, then

For a group with a few dozen members, that seems like overkill

simply by setting progressively longer times for each > moderator in the line of succession.

I have no idea what you mean here

From: txercoupemuseum.org <ercoguru@...>
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2021 14:08:33 CET

On Jan 14, 2021, at 1:56 AM, Shal Farley <shals2nd@...> wrote:

o Allows the owner(s) to establish a chain of succession (first Alice, then Bob, then Charlie, then ...) simply by setting progressively longer times for each moderator in the line of succession.

<I don’t think a “chain of succession” is desirable.

Once an owner is replaced by someone willing and > competent, after six months or a year it should then > be THEIR prerogative to designate their own successor
candidate(s).

No. When someone is promoted to owner (s)he immediately has the task of finding a spare-owner or successor - unless the group decides to disband.


groetjes/?is, Ronaldo



groetjes, Ronaldo

On 01-13-2021 17:16, ro-esp wrote:

... maybe just allow succession-requests no sooner than when the original owner has not been active in any group for 2 or 3 months, and have them step in to ask the group whether anybody has objections to promoting the moderator to owner

That is not practical. My groups operated on Yahoo for years without any owner activity (a feat, unfortunately, unable to be achieved on GIO!). While not the most active, we had 3000 members, no moderation required and no problems with SPAM. Absence of owner activity is not a reliable indicator of an owner's vitality. In fact, even on GIO, all moderation/administration requirements could be performed by separate moderators without any owner activity required at all.

Validating the death of an owner, given that he/she could have lived anyplace on the world and is only identified by an email address may just be an intractable problem.

Art

Duane:

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On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 03:46 AM, Donald Hellen wrote:

On Wed, 13 Jan 2021 17:16:51 -0800, "ro-esp" <ro-esp@...> wrote:

if you want your group to die with you, don't appoint a moderator. If you

want your group to continue, do appoint a moderator. Making it explicit would
be better

Better yet, appoint another owner so full group management privileges
are there for them. That is, if you can trust the person.

I don't want to invite power-games. If I (owner) die, I want the moderator to become owner and appoint a new moderator. If the moderator dies with me, I want the group to still have the ability to go on.

groetjes/?is, Ronaldo

OK, I egrep'ed those out, removed the spurious characters and submitted them in the web form.?

There were 30 of them.

Thanks for the corrections.

I suppose I should have known the '<' and '>' were literal in the name, email line format.

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 03:17 PM, txercoupemuseum.org wrote:

Some, if not a majority, who definitely want their group to continue incase of their disability or death have no one “groomed” for succession. ?I would go so far as to say that these owners tend to be the most “invested” in their groups, whether in time, money, or both. ?Their concerns are real and to ignore or dismiss them is most definitely incendiary. ?

?

Their subscribers ambitious and capable enough to take over should not have the option to do so before an owner or founder is ready and willing to step down. ?In most cases it’s just not possible to “know” people that well you have never met in person and probably never will.

I would think that would be the worst case for making someone the owner.? If you don't trust them as a full permission moderator, why would you trust them as owner?? You could make them a moderator in preparation, but they wouldn't have to actually do anything unless/until the owner is missing.

I have a couple of co-owners, as well as moderators, on 'my' groups.? If any of them appear to not be in sync with the group, I'd remove them, possibly replace them.? If one of the co-owners kicks me out, I can start a new group.

Sorry, but I'm just not seeing a problem here.

Duane
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On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 03:16 PM, James Bowery wrote:

Some of the lines are just a leading blank with:

?<someguys@...>

No leading blanks and no < > on those.? Have a look at /helpcenter/ownersmanual/1/inviting-people-to-join-a-group

Duane
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I think the reason this subject can get heated is that it is one of the few where Mark (and some moderators) does/do not seem to grok (perceive in appropriate depth) the valid objections certain group owners have with the “present” system (which also existed on Yahoo). ?The significant difference there was that Yahoo was almost universally perceived as ineffective and disinterested “management”, the antithesis of the image Mark projects here on .

Somename <someguys@...>

one per line submitted.

Some of the lines are just a leading blank with:

?<someguys@...>

Thanks!

As illustrated by my prior response, "Sent Invitations" says no invitations have been sent.? So, presuming there must have been some problem with my submission I tried again.

After re-submitting the tab separated name and email lines I received feedback that the emails were invalid and I figured out they had been surrounded by quotes.? So I removed all quotes and re-submitted again.

This time no errors but rather the message about needing "approval" again:

"You have reached the limit for number of invites that can be sent out without approval. Once your new invites have been approved, they will be sent out. You will receive a notification when this happens."

Yet when I went to the "Sent Invitations" page, it, again, said "There are no invitations."

The phrase "reached the limit" seems to imply that up till that limit, invitations are sent but then beyond that limit they are only sent after "approval".

How many invitations can be sent without approval?? How many invitations?are sent without approval when there are too many for all?to be sent without approval?? None?

>?I am talking about no one even commented on my suggestions. It was like I had never written them.

A well written thought hardly requires correction or comment. Congradulate yourself! Anything I write that gets a comment is due to a flaw or oversight in my writing or on the part of an ocassional careless reading. And good thoughts may generate others ponderance so again, no responce - good job. You're an owner. Most of what you do gets no pat on the back, but no slaps, either. Need those? Start a self-help group for it. Personally, I don't think much [positively] towards folks on the "what-he-said," bandwagon. You're an owner. You took that gauntlet up. That alone says enough [positive] about you. If you need to write that down and put it in your wallet (or clutch,) do so. There's nothing wrong w your ideas. That alone paints them worthy. Some folks have a... "talent," we'll call it, or desire and ability, for generating discussion that gets remarks. This is not neccessarily *always* a positive attribute nor does it means they are born leaders. It does not build them or their ideas up nor should it comparitively belittle your ideas or you in any way. Don't be a joiner or a follower. Stay, You. You, "is good thing."

BillSF9c

James,

In your first message you said that you have tried uploading your invitation list twice. The first time, you accidentally uploaded your Yahoo! Groups data file in ZIP format, so that didn't work for obvious reasons. The second time, you uploaded a TSV file. That would not work either. The instruction says: "Upload a file containing the email addresses to invite, one per line." The only format acceptable is a plain text file with one email address (and, optionally, a Display Name) per line. So, on each line you can have
email@...
or
Display Name <email@...>

Try putting together a text file with that format and upload it. If you do more than 20 invitations at a time, you'll get the "waiting for approval" message. That just means that the addresses are being validated, which usually takes less than an hour, and often is very quick. Check your "Invites Sent" once in a while and pretty soon they will appear.

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Robert R.

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Oh I know that you don't congratulate yourself. But I say you do a great job reporting the bugs. ? But I?mentioned a sort of bug?to GMF yesterday and was told to write about to the Beta group which I at first said I would but didn't do and will not. It had to do with the deletion of a graphic. ? Now I am not talking about attachments. This was an email where the graphics were embedded in the body of the email. It shows up in the upper portion of the email when moderating it in the pending messages. They also show up in squares down below. Now when a graphic is deleted from below by checking off the delete tic for that graphic but doing nothing above, when that message is approved, in the email version of the share, we see a X where the graphic used to be. However in the message archives there isn't any X and it is completely gone. ? So in order to get rid of the X in the body of the email version, I was told that both the upper and lower sections needed to be removed. I did that the next time and it worked. But I was also?told that it may be a bug and I should write about it on Beta. ? Leeni ?? ? ? ? ?

On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 05:01 PM, Ken Cameron wrote:

That's the biggest gap, is the group intended to
continue beyond the owner or not. While I think for many groups the intent
is to continue, I'm sure there are some that do not intend it to continue.

And to muddy the waters a bit (perhaps!) what about the situation where members have paid to be members under the planned new charging or donation schemes? It seems entirely wrong that an owner can accept money from individuals while knowing that if anything happens to them (the owner) then the group "dies" and the member's payment is then worthless.

Chris

".... my primary concern, which I believe most share, is for a group to be able to continue with a new Owner. 
Currently there is not enough protection for an Owner to be comfortable in many/most cases to have multiple Owners, or to designate who (or how) a Moderator or Member would be promoted to Owner should all current Owner(s) be on the same Bus/Plane that crashes with no survivors (or perish from getting COVID, perhaps at the same gathering)...

Those who say such a thing couldn't happen forget that whole teams have perished in plane crashes, or that Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or such tragedies have occurred."

I have a suggestion.

A few days ago, I was looking through an old notebook and found a Hotmail address I had used years ago.?? I went to Hotmail to check that address and see if there were any messages there.?? The reply I received stated that no such email address existed.

?? That tells me that there is a timer somewhere in their software that says that after a certain amount of time, maybe years,? if there was no activity on my part, the email address was purged.

What an idea!!!?? A timer, that monitors whether a person makes themselves known for a certain amount of time!!!

??? Well, ok, how about this.??? Pick a time, maybe a couple of years, maybe 3 or maybe 1, if the owner of a group has not checked in, has not done anything to prove he still exists, then the ownership of the group becomes available to the most senior moderator if that moderator writes in and requests to be made owner.

?? After all, if the owner trusted that person to be a moderator, he must have been in good standing with the owner all along.

?? If the most senior moderator has also been absent for a while, maybe a request from the second-most senior moderator could trigger another timer, that timer would give the first most senior moderator something like 6 months to make himself known.? If he did not, then the ownership would be available to the second-most senior moderator.

?? And so on, through all the moderators.

?? This whole scenario would give the original owner ample time to come out of the woodwork if he was paying any attention at all and respond to a notice that would be sent to him telling him that his timer was about to time-out.

?? If he did not respond, it would be assumed that he is no longer alive and does not care


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Duane:

There was a sometimes heated discussion about that on the beta group awhile back.? I think Mark decided the current mechanism was a good compromise of the sides.? The original owner (founder) can maintain ultimate control, but give moderators all the permissions so they can do everything except promote themselves to owner, demote an owner, and delete group.? They can promote others to the same moderator level as themselves, so the group should be able to continue indefinitely.

Thank you, Duane. That's fine for me and that's what I did.
Judging from the posts, I see that the subject is still a hot one, though.
Regards,
Marina

?

One option that might make the automatic option more trustable would be that
an owner must have more than one way to be contacted. Like an additional
email, text, or voice response phone number. The timer would try the
alternate method before going further. The idea is to give the owner a last
chance in case they had an email problem. Think of it as a keep alive
reminding them that they are an owner. This might also be useful to the case
of the owner email going into the bouncing state. Granted we'd still have
the issue of these becoming outdated but failure of these help support the
case where the survivor selection from the moderators or members become
important.

That last part, that a group member might be promoted, covers where the
single owner didn't want other moderators. They could tag anyone in the
group for promotion if they cease to respond to any contact. I could also
see the system sending warning messages if the owner hasn't been seen. The
warnings could also contain options for the owner to change things like
promote sooner, change who is promotable, etc...

But at the top of all of this should be a selection by the owner about the
group being something that should or should not be continued if they are
found to be 'not found'. That's the biggest gap, is the group intended to
continue beyond the owner or not. While I think for many groups the intent
is to continue, I'm sure there are some that do not intend it to continue.
Knowing the intent would make all of this much clearer as to what GIO should
be doing. That in turn justifies what should happen.

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