Ralph L. Vinciguerra
2002-07-15
You're here because you want to be part of a Yahoo Group. Yahoo Groups are a useful and free way to facilitate communication within a group of people. They are a free electronic internet service of the Yahoo Website. However, they can be a bit tricky to set up properly, and that's the justification for this short guide. Once you have things set up correctly, they cruise along quite nicely.
A yahoo group is created by a moderator, who then invites people to participate as members. You can be a member of the group two ways:
If you initially joined the group with e-mail only access, switching to the more flexible form of access requires setting up a yahoo ID and this usually introduces great confusion, as it's tricky or darn near impossible to get Yahoo to understand that you want to convert your membership mode. Press on, brave reader!
On commercials:
Concerning advertisements, Yahoo will inject these into the various
messages that traverse the Yahoo Group implementation. This is a
symbiotic relationship, they give us free services in exchange
for the presence of advertising messages; similarly to watching
broadcast TV. They cannot be disabled; the only solution would be
for me to run special software of my own on my server, and I've haven't
had the resources, or the quality of internet connection to take that
on... yet.
This is a quick and semi-effective way to use a group. In this case you are added to the group (or invited) by the moderator, with only your normal e-mail address as the necessary information.
Messages sent to the group by others will be sent to the e-mail address you give to the moderator. If you reply to these messages, they will automatically return to the entire group (see the "Reply-To" field that you get when your e-mail software stages a reply).
This form of access cannot be directly converted to the more flexible form of access detailed in the next section, unless you take special steps detailed in the next section.
Having full access to a Yahoo Group has several advantages that are mediated through a central group website that requires you to login with a password:
Establishing flexible access requires one essential task on your part. You must signup for a proper "Yahoo ID" (or account) and communicate that ID to the group moderator. These IDs are free, and enable you access to additional Yahoo services if you so desire (beyond the scope of this humble document). However note that, without this form of identification, the Yahoo Group system can't properly recognize you and grant you access to it's more extensive features.
Establishing your Yahoo ID is easy, so take these steps:
Now that you have a yahoo ID (or had one before):
Do not be afraid, or as they say it these days "No Fear!". You can't break anything, and even though I've been a bit verbose above, it's to make sure things go smoothly. The actually task you have to get connected is pretty simple if you keep calm and read each web page that comes before you a couple times over. You'll get the hang of what's going on. Also, the Yahoo system is pretty well documented, but can require some patience.
If all else fails and this task is totally opaque to you, then go ahead and contact the poor overworked moderator. Just kidding, go ahead and get some help!
For of course, if this document had been written properly you'd be all set by now without having to ask extra questions. So, if you followed these instructions, have succeeded, and are muttering to yourself: "If he had just told me X, I'd have saved many minutes of my time." do let me know, so I can add the missing details to this document.
