Yahoogroups, what the????

[fenchurch]

Why, oh why did they feel the need to screw around with something that was working? The new design is horrible and reminds me of MSN Communities (which I've always hated to use). The new look is more graphical, so even on broadband, the pages take longer to load and are wider, so I've got to allot more screenspace to the window.

Oh, and in the message index they display the messages in descending order -- I prefer them in ascending (which is how they used to display -- and I can't find any options to set it back to that). This means when reading through messages, in order to get the next one, I have to hit "previous" instead of "next." That makes the kind of sense that's NOT.

I've tried posting a few things to one of the lists and the first message showed up just fine, but every other one will display the text in the "preview" but will be blank when I open it (the text is there, though, because it gets quoted if I try to reply to the missing message).

And I can see why they thought it would be gosh-golly-gee-neat to have a tiny thumbnail of each group's main page image next to the group name in the My Groups listing... but that means it now only displays the first five groups, instead of the first twenty or so.

Yuck yuck yuck.

ETA: Oh, this little "upgrade" of theirs was SO not ready for primetime. While browsing through messages on the web interface, I'm occasionally getting a windows secured login prompt for a beta directory at yahoo.

Comments

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I don't like it! Sure, it was a bit antiquated, but it worked simply and easily. No bells and whistles...

Actually it STILL doesn't have bells and whistles. It just looks funky.

Don't like it. Nuh-uh. Don't like it at all.

[saifai.livejournal.com]

OH geez. I didn't even know. It's awful. All the settings I had on my own groups have been reset now. It's awful to use, you're right on that.

Be sure to use the feedback (http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/groups/cgi_alpha) feature to let them know. If enough people complain about it, maybe they'll make a few adjustments.

[fenchurche.livejournal.com]

I'm doing just that right now. In fact, I used my LJ post here as a template, and added a few pointed remarks about how the "update" appears to have been rather sloppily done and hastily applied.

[saifai.livejournal.com]

Mine probably wasn't much better in the positive remarks category.

[lightningbaron.livejournal.com]

Although it looks "cleaner" somehow, I don't like the new layout at first glance either. I'll poke around tomorrow to see how else it's screwed up as you reported :p Yahoogroups never seems to be able to make a new layout that really clicks. But the alternatives out there aren't much better (IMHO).

[tomte.livejournal.com]

I just deleted a little-used Yahoo group that I own. When they asked for a reason to confirm deletion, I told them plainly that their new format sucked.

I'm sure it won't make any difference, though.

[djonn]

Oh, and in the message index they display the messages in descending order -- I prefer them in ascending (which is how they used to display -- and I can't find any options to set it back to that).

Meandering past, having detoured through from cadhla's LJ:

On the message index screen there is a Very Small Icon next to "Date" in the row of headings. If you click on that icon, it will toggle the message display so that messages are listed in ascending order. (I think that if you magnify the Very Small Icon a few hundred times, it becomes a triangle-arrow, but at its actually-displayed size it's entirely understandable that nobody realizes it's a sort toggle.)

[fenchurche.livejournal.com]

Yay!!! Thank you!

Sheesh... could they make it any harder to find?