Migration to Groups.io Fall 2018 Has Completed

With 2018 being the 20th Anniversary year of the ASCOM Initiative, it was time we moved away from the outdated Yahoo! Groups system and onto a much more modern and functional forum system. Also, along with this improvement, we now offer separate discussion areas to our two primary groups: ASCOM Platform users and ASCOM application / driver developers.

Why did we dothis?

• Yahoo! started injecting commercial advertisements into the message list
• Posting with inline images is klunky and sometimes only email subscribers can post or see them
• Attachments were not saved with messages, forcing us to use the "Files" system which has become clogged with what is now mostly trash.
• You could not make corrections to a post once it is out there
• People complained of lost messages
• Conversations were hard to follow in many cases
• Searching was severely limited

The ASCOM Talk moderators took a look at the many newer and more powerful systems out there and we have chosen Groups.io as our new platform. Here are some of the reasons we picked Groups.io:

• It supports email-based participation like Yahoo. We considered this a 100% essential requirement. Only a few of the forums out there can even do it and Groups.io does a great job.
• The site itself, and its discussion interface is simple, clean, and minimalistic. I personally found Yahoo! Groups difficult to use and non-intuitive, perhaps because it is an afterthought interface on an old-fashioned 'listserv' mailer.
• Only an email address is required to join, no frustrating and confusing requirement for a Yahoo! login and forced yahoo.com email etc.
• We can integrate with GitHub, the Open Source repository used by the ASCOM Platform. This feature has made Groups.io very popular with Open Source projects.
• It supports hashtags for enhanced searching, a vast improvement over Yahoo.
• You can elect to receive only the messages you want: Mute threads and hashtags. THIS IS HUGE! From time to time we all see giant threads discussing something we are not interested in and that, as email subscribers, clog up our email box. You will be able to mute these at the source in the new system.
• Separate Help and Developer forums will also reduce the noise for each of those groups. Most importantly, new users with Platform problems won't need to be exposed to obscure-looking programming discussions when all they want is help with their installation or usage.
• You can post new threads and replies with Rich Text/HTML, Markdown, or plain text. Their editing interface is excellent.
• You can also edit already-posted messages. How many times have you wished you could go back and fix errors in your posts?
• Other modern-day conveniences are provided like a Group Wiki, Calendar, Database, Chat service, and a Photos library.
• We can migrate existing users from Yahoo, eliminating the need to make people re-subscribe.
• A number of very busy astronomy groups including several LX200 groups, Losmandy, Gemini, MI-250, and Mallincam have already moved from Yahoo! to Groups.io. ASCOM is using the paid groups.io service and we have contributors who will fund this, so you can be assured of not seeing adverts in the future should groups.io decide to enhance its revenue stream on the free version of its service.

What Happened in Early October 2018?

We used the groups.io automatic migration process. All of the historic ASCOM-Talk messages and our current user base have been migrated and we have closed the Yahoo forum. You should have already receive notification and welcome emails.