Hi all again,

I have this bunch of people ussing a yahoo group and want to bring them to a XOOPS group,

well, I have, as allways,some users came in and other users are been reluctant to it, so I thought I should share here their reasons not to switch, so that maybe someone here could help me to come up with solutions and reasons to convince the non believers.

Reasons they give:

1- you can't answer the forums threads email by replying to the same email, instead they have to log into the forum to reply.... any ideas?

2- you can't read the replied message on the email, you have to go to the forum for that

3- there is a lot of history on the yahoo group that may not be ported to this new group.

4- yahoo groups has fairly the same features....


thanks for your comments

well the biggest reason is that a forum is not the same thing as a web-based mailing list. It's primary means of entry is supposed to be the webbrowser, not an email client. This doesn't mean that someone could not write a clone of yahoo-groups for xoops, just that newbb is not intended to be one.

i think the newbb2 team a working with email2forum... if i'm mistaken please correct me...

Do you own the Yahoo group ? If so, and if you really want them using the forum instead, then I suggest sending a final message to the group announcing that it is going to be *closed* and giving them a link to the registration page of your XOOPS site, maybe with a bit of spin on the 'advantages' of the forum. You will inevitably suffer a lot of losses, but those people that don't shift are usually the ones that only have a marginal interest in the topic anyway. There are some email modules (I think eveningnews ?)

Having said that, email listservs and forums are quite different media. Pretty much anyone can use an email list and a lot of people depend on the fact that it ends up in their inbox. Many people either don't know how to use forums, can't be bothered opening a page to see what's happening (this is really big problem), or just find the learning curve intimidating.

I have a problem with the last two since my target group is not very computer literate. I wrote a 'users guide' to help raise awareness of the forums, notifications and other things. If you find it useful feel free to rip bits out of it to suit your own purposes.

Ermmm...I forgot to mention: We changed our IP number today. The DNS is in play for the next 3 days or so, if if the link doesn't work right now try again on Monday afternoon. Sorry...

Good luck.

hi thanks a lot for your advices,

how about trying to bring the old data from yahoo?
this is one of the big issues.
a lot of interesting information, I admit, would be lost.

I don't own the yahoo group and seems like the actual owner is no longer active.

I did this earlier this year. I had a yahoo groups with about 275 members. Some of them came, some of them didn't. The ones that didn't I was not concerned about. They were on my list to advertise their business on our once a week day for advertising.

It is going to be harder if you don't own that list. All you can do is continue to email them a bi-weekly reminder about all that is going on at the site. Keep them updated about new things, etc.

Last week, I went through a list of 400 people and deleted everyone that hadn't logged in for six months. I notified the entire membership that this was going to happen about a month in advance. I want an active site!

So I ended up with about 275 members, which is already growing again. It can be done, but it takes patience!!

I'm running a contest right now that the person with the most posts by next weekend becomes our featured person on the site for December. Seems like it's working. The posts are picking up.

Also, make sure that you post on a regular basis. With the latest newbb release, you can view all posts that are unread. I use this feature ALL the time!

Hope this helps! May you have success with this!

Kelly Ling

A very interesting subject and one that my partner has considerd long and hard for some time. She runs several yahoo groups and is a members of many others.

To condense it all, her feelings are that yahoo have found the right formulae for group communication. They are so popular that millions of users choose their option over anything else. (complete with subliminal adverising and some appaling features)

This was an interesting comment by Ackbarr
Quote:

So if yahoo is so poupular ... why does no-one do this???

yahoo without adverts and a few other features ironed out would be SUPERB. But no-one does it.

Well the closest Ive found with XOOPS is the port of wordpress. Sure its a blog, but only in name and it doesnt send out email digests, but you can post by email.

Maybe one day some forward looking developer will turn their attention to this huge untapped opportunity !

Quote:


is true?! Somebody can confirm this plz!? Predator?

I did something simlar a few years ago, of course they all wont move over, but I found stating the following helped:

- No ad banners, or annoying pop-ups (like yahoo)
- Faster service
- Competition (maybe)
- Features - Features within XOOPS far out weight those of yahoo groups, especially the new forum (newbb2), then pm'ing notification of only forums you wish to see.
- Privacy (hide E-mail)

Then depends on your modules, like photo albums (myalbum, Xgal, etc), calandars, blogs, etc, etc

Quote:

i refer to this news: Newbb 2.0 RC1 available

in the second page, in predators' ToDo List for the Version 2.1... there is "Posting with Emails" features. I think it's will be great if newbb 2.1 have this features...