I’ve run a Yahoo! Group for coming on 7 years now - for owners of Bantam Jeep Trailers made in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. The group has roughly 550 members scattered around the globe. 

I just recently responded to some requests for improvements to the group - as valuable information gets buried in email archives that aren’t easily searchable.  I had to respond saying basically that my hands were tied because of the tools that Yahoo! provides, and that they hadn’t done much with the Groups interface.

This morning when I went to approve a new member I was greeted with this:

Interested in Trying the All-New Yahoo! Groups?

We’d like to recognize your valuable efforts as a group owner by giving your group the chance to be among the first to experience our new Yahoo! Groups Beta.

We’ve listened to your feedback and renovated Yahoo! Groups so that every group can be unique, every experience can be tailored to the group’s needs and members feel like they belong to a special community.

The new Yahoo! Groups offers:

- Greater customization for a more vibrant group experience
- Better communication tools for richer conversations
- Easier controls for you to moderate more efficiently

If you’re interested in trying it out, please select the group(s) you’d like to be considered for invitation below. If your group is a fit for the beta, we’ll notify you soon about how to get started.*

I’ve submitted the request to be part of the beta —I think anyway.  Either I did it about 7 times or not at all - the interface they provided gave me no feedback after clicking a “submit” button.

I’ll be curious to see what they’ve come up with for the groups experience.  I know I’d like to see:

• Better spam protection for group owners.  I was getting so much spam to the owner account that I had to shut down that address, which means sometimes requests to join the group sit for a couple of days until I remember to check for them.
• A better home-page or small website builder for the group.
• A way to tag valuable emails that run through the group and pull them into a FAQ, or Wiki, or something that keeps them closer to the surface.
• Improved image gallery—with restrictions on file size, emailed alerts when the account is getting close to being full, and better admin tools for cleaning things out.