Yahoogroups is dead. Check out groups.io and the migrated memoQ peer support!

A few weeks ago I saw a notice that Yahoo is taking down its old groups facility, which, back in the day, was like a jazzier version of the old listserves. At the beginning of my career as a commercial translator, I found the translation-related groups there to be enormously helpful, and I met many colleagues who were mentors to me and remain friends to this day. Unfortunately, some years ago, Yahoo reorganized the interface of the groups feature so that I often could not figure out how to use it any more, so aside from occasionally peeking at mailed digests of the content in half a dozen groups, I haven't participated actively in many years.

So I really wasn't sad to learn that YahooGroups are about to be axed. However, the need for better organized sites of this kind has hardly gone away. Although for many organizations and interests, Facebook has come to dominate group communications, Facebook sucks like a Kremlin vacuum cleaner from Hell when it comes to managing content for user advice and Help. Even users who are not lazy find it difficult to search for solutions already posted, so one tends to see the same help requests every week, sometimes the same issue more than once in a day. The archives of a good listserve are usually much better sources of help.

So I was pleased to hear that the YahooGroup for memoQ peer-to-peer support had migrated to a new platform at https://groups.io/g/memoQ/. And I hope other good CAT tool support groups do the same (feel free to post any such links in the comments).

Even if Facebook were not the cesspit of fake news, political and social manipulation that threatens the stability of so many countries around the world as well as the physical safety of everyone (live streaming mass slaughter isn't my idea of fun on a Saturday night, but then I am a bit old-fashioned), it is unlikely that it will ever become a good platform for the kind of technical information sharing among professional peers that we need. YahooGroups met that need once, and I think that these new incarnations on Groups.io may do a better job with less (or no?) trashy ad spam.

If you are a memoQ user, I encourage you to join the new group if you were not already on the old YahooGroups platform. (If you were, you have probably already been migrated by the helpful moderators.) Contribute your expertise, and ask the questions that need asking and answering for all of us to move forward with the technical challenges of the tools we use.

RIP Yahoogroups :-(

No, the popular free Yahoogroups have not been eliminated. Yet.

However, the latest "improvements" introduced by the idiots at Yahoo responsible for such things may have killed the usefulness of this feature for many people.

Those who use or subscribe to these groups - which cover a range of subjects far beyond translation - will understand what I mean if they have occasion to use the web interface sometimes. The new web design introduced a few weeks ago is radically different and disorienting, and I must now resort to e-mail functions if I want to contribute to a discussion. Many others seem to have similar issues.

Note to designers and developers: if it ain't broke, maybe you should keep your hands off it. Something might look dated but still be far more serviceable than your "clever" new design ideas.

I see this all as part of a trend to undermine years of progress in human/computer interface design. In recent years, programmers have been moving close boxes on dialogs, perhaps to overcome well-trained user impulses to get rid of them before they are read. Often there is a commercial interest behind such a change. Or it might be pure, stupid ego. I am reminded of an arrogant SOB at a former employer of mine in Germany, a very intelligent software developer who had created an interesting document management module but decided one day that print functions belong under the Edit menu. WTF? He was completely deaf to all protests that the File menu was the standard, expected place for such things and felt that as a demigod he had the right to dictate to thousands of others that they must bow to his superior will.

This is not a useful way to work. We programmers are not gods, though at times I'm not sure thata ll of us are human. (Most are in the ways that count, fortunately.)

When I think of the great contributions these online groups have made to our translation profession, providing support communities for the software we use, for our discussions of language, the payment practices of clients and much more, I am very saddened to think that this might all be lost now because of the stupid redesign by Yahoo. But Yahoo is a troubled company and may be on the way out, so perhaps we need to think about ways of preserving these information archives if they are worth keeping and look to new fora for the future. Google+? Maybe. But despite all the enthusiasm of Guy Kawasaki and the interesting things I am discovering in that integrated platform, I do not yet see it as offering structured discussion groups in quite the same useful way. I hope I'm missing something obvious.

Apparently Yahoo is receiving many thousands of complaints, access to those with disabilities no longer work, and there are many new problems with technical features and spam. But why should that matter to demigods? "Neo", as the new mess is called, is here to stay according to Yahoo.

There are many discussions of the problem out there. Most I find depressing. Don't bother. 

Time to vote with our feet?