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Hello everyone

When migrating a group from e.g. Yahoogroups, has anyone here have experience on using the custom wording of the invitation as a GDPR notice, i.e. a notice to people that their personal information are in the archives and optionally that they can request the removal of it by contacting the moderator?? What are your thoughts on that?

I'm about to migrate a group with very few currently active participants, but with 20000 old messages, and in the past 20 years some 1500 people had posted to the list, and since we'd like to keep the archives in the Files or Database section (and since in our case we don't have access to the list of current subscribers), I thought it would be an idea to kill two birds with one stone and just invite all 1500 people who have previously posted to the list, and phrase the invitation in such a way that it is either less of an invitation or not only an invitation and more of (or also) a notice that the particular e-mail address is contained in the archives -- and of course, if anyone wants to join the new group, they can do so by accepting the invitation.

Samuel

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 12:39 PM, Samuel Murray wrote:

...has anyone here have experience on using the custom wording of the invitation as a GDPR notice, i.e. a notice to people that their personal information are in the archives and optionally that they can request the removal of it by contacting the moderator?? What are your thoughts on that?

It can hardly do any harm, can it? My first thought was that this would only give your members one opportunity to see your Data Protection notice, so why not put it in your wiki for future reference.

Then I remembered that new Basic groups don't have a wiki, leaving them with nowhere to put such a notice so that members can refer to it at any time.

I cannot work out if this shortcoming is serious or not.

Chris

Hi Samuel

It would possibly be worth mentioning in the wording that although email addresses *may* be in the archives transferred, (I say may as all email addresses were erased in our rootsweb archives) they would only be visible to subscribers to the group on groups.io

Non members would not see them

Nivard Ovington in Cornwall (UK)

On 15/11/2020 13:58, Chris Jones via groups.io wrote:

Then I remembered that new Basic groups don't /have/ a wiki, leaving them with nowhere to put such a notice so that members can refer to it at any time.

Good grief, I've just noticed that just about everything has been removed from the basic free groups. No files, no database, no wiki, despite a size limitation of 1 GB for messages. And $220 per year is super expensive. I'm afraid this means that for all practical purposes, Groups.io has now also ceased to exist for new groups. :-(

Samuel

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 08:43 AM, Samuel Murray wrote:

I'm afraid this means that for all practical purposes, Groups.io has now also ceased to exist for new groups. :-(

The information could be included in a file attached to a message.? Attachments are still available and are included in the storage allowed.

Duane
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The official Groups.io user documentation is in the Groups.io Help Center.
GMF's Unofficial Help Wiki: /g/GroupManagersForum/wiki

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 08:48 AM, Duane wrote:

The information could be included in a file attached to a message.

In addition, you could make that message a Sticky so it would be at the top of the message archive for easy access.? You could also lock it if you don't want discussion about it.

Duane
--
The official Groups.io user documentation is in the Groups.io Help Center.
GMF's Unofficial Help Wiki: /g/GroupManagersForum/wiki

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 02:56 PM, Duane wrote:

In addition, you could make that message a Sticky so it would be at the top of the message archive for easy access.? You could also lock it if you don't want discussion about it.

IMHO that would be a significantly better option than using an attached file. Not only could the latter be hard to find before long, sooner or later it would be automatically deleted to make way for something else. (Unless of course the group in question wasn't set to autodelete oldest first material, in which case attachments would cease to work at all.)

A small correction to Samuel's size limitation of 1 GB for messages; the 1 GB is for attachments; there is no limit for messages themselves.

Chris

On 15/11/2020 16:16, Chris Jones via groups.io wrote:

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 02:56 PM, Duane wrote:
In addition, you could make that message a Sticky so it would be at
the top of the message archive for easy access.? You could also lock
it if you don't want discussion about it.
IMHO that would be a /significantly/ better option than using an attached file.

Yes, I've just tested a few options for exactly that.

1. I'm not sure what the size limitation for the front page is, but I was able to make the front page VERY long in a test group just now.

2. One can make messages sticky.

3. One can edit messages (so, you can edit the sticky message).

4. One can remove attachments or images from a message while editing it, but one can't add new attachments or new images to a message (except by linking to a source off-site).

5. In the Groups.io interface, attachments show up as attachments. However, in e.g. Thunderbird, HTML and TXT attachments are shown inline, so if one were to make archives available in e.g. PG Offline's HTML format, users of off-site mail readers would be able to search within archives without the need to download messages.

6. As far as I know, you can't make specific messages unavailable to the public. This means that if your group has public archives, you can't restrict the old archives to just members of your group, unless you attach them as zipped files with a password on them.

This is perhaps the biggest downside of all this: one can't restrict certain content to members, if the group isn't private.

7. Some old MBOX files contain things that some mail servers consider viruses, so if you are going to post an MBOX file as clear text, you may need to find a way to sanitize it of "viruses".

8. Groups.io does not allow EXE files as attachments, but AFAIK it does allow ZIP files with EXE files inside them.

9. There is no space to put moderator-only information, but one can add such information on a Google Doc and put the URL in a "Locked Group" notice -- since free groups can't be locked, there is less risk of accidentally sending the information to a member or members, but even if that happens, the notice contains only a URL to a site where moderators still need to sign in to see the content.

10. The Guidelines notice still exits for free groups.

Any other tips for making the most of the free basic group w.r.t. the lack of photos, files and database sections?

Samuel

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 11:37 AM, Samuel Murray wrote:

9. There is no space to put moderator-only information

A work around for this would be to put it in the Notes for one of the owner/mods (I'm pretty sure this still exists on new groups.)? Maybe use a secondary (throw away?) address that would only be used for this purpose.? I don't put anything in my own Notes, so that would work for me.? Other owner/mods would have access, but not members.

Duane
PS? It's sort of fun figuring out how to do things that can't be done in the 'normal' way. ;>)
--
The official Groups.io user documentation is in the Groups.io Help Center.
GMF's Unofficial Help Wiki: /g/GroupManagersForum/wiki

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 05:37 PM, Samuel Murray wrote:

2. One can make messages sticky.

Having done a quick test it appears as though you can, but you can't. Using the drop down beneath a Topic (in Topics view) reveals a Make Sticky option. Using the More hamburger at the bottom of an individual message also reveals a Make Sticky option, but it applies to the entire topic, not just a single message within the topic.

Chris

Chris,

If you can then make a new message, make it locked so no further entries to
the topic, and then make that sticky, would that work?

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

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 07:27 PM, Ken Cameron wrote:

If you can then make a new message, make it locked so no further entries to
the topic, and then make that sticky, would that work?

Yes, although I much prefer the term Topic rather than message in this instance. In addition, if the sticky topic is a replacement for a wiki entry (because there is no wiki!) then a carefully selected (moderator only) hashtag would be not just appropriate but necessary.

Chris

On 17/11/2020 09:43, Valorie Zimmerman wrote:

The last new group I started, I was a bit shocked as well. However, I think my grandfathered groups are just spoiled! In a few of them, we use all the bells and whistles.

Yes, but killing off the file storage is a big blow. Database and photo storage isn't that big of a deal (for me).

I know Google Groups and FreeLists don't have file storage, but Yahoogroups did, and it seems natural to me that a mailing list should have some kind of place where related stuff can be stored. It doesn't need to be gigabytes.

We had planned to put our Yahoogroups archives in the Files section --
not only can one search within files in the File section, but one can also hide the Files from non-members, if the messages are public.

The alternative offered, namely to make files available via posting sticky topics, does not allow for the attachments to be searched and it makes the attachments available to the public, which means that we'd have to either password-protect the old archives (and let the moderators decide who to give the passwords to) or we have to make the list private. The alternative to that is to host the files somewhere else and just provide a link to it, but if you're going to be hosting your files somewhere else, one might almost consider simply hosting the mailing list somewhere else as well.

...but so far, it is still far better than either forums or mail lists, because it is the best of both.

Just about the only thing that makes Groups.io better at this time (for me) is the fact that one can have some control over large attachments.

Samuel

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 06:20 AM, Samuel Murray wrote:

it makes the attachments available to the public

I don't think so.? I believe you have to be a member to retrieve file attachments.? If your test group has public messages, create one with an attached file.? Then sign out, go to the group, and click on the attachment.? It would be good to know this for sure.? That would still leave the searchability issue though.

Duane

On 17/11/2020 13:44, Duane wrote:

If your test group has public messages, create one with an attached file.? Then sign out, go to the group, and click on the attachment.? It would be good to know this for sure.

These days, test groups must be non-public, but fortunately I still have a grandfathered test group with "Archive is visible to anyone", and so I tested it: yep, I can access the attachments.

,,,20,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,20,2,0,69680521

As for archive searching, I tried posting a PG Offline HTML export as an "HTML e-mail" to the test list, and it arrived as an HTML e-mail, which doesn't look exactly like the PG Offline export, but it does allow for searching the Yahoogroups archives (of course: this would be used in a private group, otherwise the Yahoogroups archive become public).

Samuel