14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo has been trying to revamp its major products for months, rolling out change after change, more often than not missing the mark and annoying users.
Yahoo Mail is perhaps the most obvious casualty of the company’s efforts. Millions of people have used this webmail for over a decade. The new changes were meant to bring YMail back to the present, make it relevant once more with a new flashy interface. The result was a buggy service that users hated because core functionalities had just vanished.
Pretty much the same thing happened to Yahoo Groups with a difference – the changes didn’t just annoy people, they deeply affected their lives.
The NEO-pocalypse
Last year, Yahoo rolled out NEO, an update that was supposed to make Groups look nice again, modern and the go-to place for all those new young users that Yahoo was hoping to attract with its new strategy that included buying Tumblr.
In its move, Yahoo forgot one big thing – the millions of users that Groups already had. Tens of thousands of users have already jumped ship, deciding that the NEO version of the service wasn’t something they could deal with.
Even worse, not even young people are big fans of the changes. In fact, one of the biggest groups asking Yahoo to bring back the Classic version, SAYNO2NEO, is mostly formed of teenagers.
In total, there are some 7,000 teenagers and young adults who are all urging Yahoo to listen to the needs of the elderly and disabled and to restore group functionality.
This isn’t even a matter of resistance to changes, like it happens on many occasions, but rather a problem of functionality loss.
When NEO was implemented, users had absolutely no warning. This was probably Yahoo’s way of avoiding public outrage before the product was even out there and hoping that users would simply embrace it from lack of an alternative.
Overnight, they lost the pictures they had set for their groups, as well as access to the archives where they had tens of thousands of documents that they could no longer recover.
Moderator tools have gone missing too and the entire product has become less intuitive overall, with many features that are hidden, some that have disappeared and others that have been renamed, forcing people to spend a lot of time rediscovering Groups.
One of the users having troubles with this is Nubia from France. She’s been running a Yahoo Group since 2005, focusing on creating a place to publish poetry, meaningful texts and quotes.
As NEO rolled out, she lost over 1,000 members, while most of the members of her group, some 30,000 of them, felt the need to also move over to the Facebook fan page to make sure they didn’t lose touch with her, since it’s been known for Yahoo Groups to unexpectedly vanish due to system glitches.
Nubia is quite frustrated with the changes and believes that all group owners are Yahoo’s guinea pigs. “I kept my Yahoo group open out of respect for the members, but frankly speaking I hate it since they changed into this NEO failure. As I said to Jeff Bonforte [Senior Vice President for Communications Products] from Yahoo, it would have been better to close down Yahoo Groups than change it into NEO,” she said, pointing out that after so many years, swapping to NEO ruined the experience completely.
The list of bugs and problems reported by users is huge. Most of the features that were once available have not yet been brought back and chances are that such a thing will not actually happen. In fact, in a message posted by Yahoo on a feedback forum, it explicitly said that it wouldn’t roll back to the Classic version.
Life with NEO
As mentioned, one of the biggest issues that Groups users are complaining about is the way NEO is affecting the way those who are disabled or elderly use the platform. There are now too many drop-down menus that require a bit more skill to access, and users with limited motor function are unable to use the voice recognition software on the site.
One user in this situation is Hilary, a member of several support groups on Yahoo, who uses Dragon Naturally Speaking, a speech-to-text software, to navigate the Internet. “I am disabled and find typing very hard; I therefore normally use the voice recognition software Dragon and this does not work with Yahoo any longer,” Hilary said for Softpedia.
“I could also no longer get into some of my groups, one of which was a suicide support group. The main thing is that my ‘lifeline,’ namely the groups, is no longer viable; some have just become spam-ridden as the owner/moderators can no longer moderate. I had to close three groups down as I couldn't do anything! Also, I am not getting all the messages, and cannot always get into the groups to see what I am missing,” she added.
NEO and the legal hurdles
Brenda Fowler has been a Yahoo Groups user for many years. Back in 2010, she opposed a big change that was rolled out to the service and now she’s back, taking on a leading role in the fight against Yahoo. She built a blog and managed to bring people together, other users who hate NEO as much as she does, group members and moderators alike.
“Jeff Bonforte insisted Classic was falling apart, although programmers both on and off my group disagree. They didn't warn us because they knew we'd protest, so they did it without warning, and many people lost years and years of data. Jeff admitted it had over 1000+ bugs when we were thrown into this untested interface, and 8 months later it's still a broken mess,” she said for Softpedia.
Overall, Fowler says that NEO has impacted the disabled and elderly to a point that it no longer even respects the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The same idea is backed up by the members of the SAYNO2NEO group.
Furthermore, Edward Valdez, a sponsor of the group says that the format is also at variance with the Child Online Protection and Privacy act as amended. One of the issues is the new statute granted by California to minor children, forbidding Internet service to track their activities. Instead, when posting to Yahoo groups directly, the IP of the user is disclosed, effectively killing an important privacy layer.
Yahoo tried to justify the changes, saying that the infrastructure was old. For the sake of future stability, the platform had to be upgraded, which is how NEO came to be.
The company also stressed how important it was for Groups to work well on other platforms, including smartphones and tablets. Unfortunately, users are complaining that things are far from perfect in this area as well. In fact, a list put together by groups that fight to get back the Classic Groups is saying that the platform isn’t functioning well, that pinch zoom is nearly impossible and that the mobile display is too different from the desktop one, making it difficult to locate most of the controls.
“Last year, we made some design changes to many of our core sites, including Yahoo Groups. These changes are an important step to building a more modern and personalized Yahoo. We recognize that this is a lot of change and are listening to all of the community feedback. Additionally, we're actively measuring user feedback so we can continuously make improvements,” a Yahoo spokesperson said for Softpedia.
Truthfully, Yahoo Groups does look a lot more modern nowadays, but since the upgrade was made at the expense of functionality, this can be shelved as another hasty decision on the company’s part.
While a complete return to Classic is out of the question as the company stressed, perhaps Yahoo can do more to bring back some old features that long-term users find essential. After all, they wouldn’t be complaining about them if they weren’t using them.
