Sad discovery

[polygonum]

I am involved in a Yahoo group set up for an extremely rare disease. Unfortunately the group's founder died and it is left in a sort of limbo. There are two moderators who have full privilege to manage the group but can never change the ownership. Can't close it. And the problems that would be caused by founding another group are huge (many members are not exactly the most technically able). Lots of erratic members would just be lost. The archive of posts would be lost (or at least disconnected from a new group). And so on. And Yahoo are entirely unwilling to help in any way.

Similarly there seems to be no way of cleaning out the membership of deceased members.

Many years ago the systems at the company I worked for accidentally mail-shotted deceased members only with "The AA Book of Country Churchyards".

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'm a joint moderator of a Yahoo Group and it's easy enough to delete members. Even if they don't wish to be deleted. ;-) Not sure about changing ownership, though.

[Phil Addison]

Are you sure? A few years ago I looked into that and then they had a definite procedure for releasing ownership of orphaned groups. It was something along the lines of polling the members to get agreement then sending the results to yahoo for a decision... of course yahoo has gone to pot since then :(

A bit late now, but those in the know always have at least 2 yahoo IDs. The owner can then elevate the other ID/s to owner status. Multiple owners are allowed.

As Dave says, a moderator can delete members. Go to members list, search for member, click delete member.

Phil

[geoff]

Used to be the former, then got bored and became the latter

[polygonum]

Deleting members is fine - if you can identify those who are deceased.

Partner and her co-mod have researched it and even contacted Yahoo - shrugged shoulders, nothing can be done. The original owner was, so I hear, a bit possessive and maybe unlikely to share ownership - but that is precisely what should have been done.

[ARWadsworth]

dennis baiting does not make you "bad".

[Phil Addison]

You could set up a parallel group and try to get everyone to move over to it. A way of finding out who are active members is to set up a poll that states "if you want to stay in the group vote yes" the implication being that everyone that doesn't is happy to be deleted. After having posted to tell everyone to join the new group, as moderator you can effectively close down the existing group by changing permissions to not allow anyone to post. A notice on the home page that the group has moved, along with instructions how to re-join it at the new location should do the trick.

-- Phil

[polygonum]

Yes - parallel group make some sense.(The irony being there *is* a parallel group already. And partner is a mod of that as well. But the silly owner of that won't even transfer full mod rights to partner - only partial. Despite her having no interest these days in the group.) But how can you get the archive (which in the case of such a group is of huge importance) transferred in a useful and usable form?

And, as I implied, some of the group members are incredibly incapable of doing anything about changing settings. Indeed, many are not members of the existing parallel group because they can't work out how to! Sometimes I wonder how they ever got signed up in the first place. Make that "often".

[Phil Addison]

If you mean the message archive, other than manually copying across 1 at a time, or getting a programmer friend to automate it, I don't know. If you mean any databases, those do have an export button. Best bet is to ask here

And, as I implied, some of the group members are incredibly incapable of

I found a lot of hand-holding with step by step instructions necessary if you really want them to do that sort of thing. The incidence of computer literacy in those groups is vanishingly low.

-- Phil

[polygonum]

Yes - I did mean the message archive. And we would want to retain the message numbering as so many people have used them to refer to old posts...

[Thomas Prufer]

Yes it does. Shooting fish in a barrel and calling it sporting...

Thomas Prufer