New LinkedIn Group Issues

These changes mean LinkedIn has stopped being an online business group HUB, period. This could be a strategy of slowing growth since groups will no longer pull new users to LinkedIn.

The changes in effect are purposeful in this regard. Not a direction my new business development wants to travel.

Since the recent "upgrade" I can't add new members to a group I manage. When I go to the groups page, there were 5 names pending. I selected 2 of them and added them.

The groups page now shows 3 pending members, but when I go to the list all 5 are still there, and the two I selected do not show up as members. When I look at their profiles, they are not members of my group.

Also, when I list the members of the group, they used to come up in alpha order, either by last name or by email address. So I could find someone on the list without having to scroll through and read every name on the list.

Now they seem to be listed in some random order, and I can't tell if a person is on the list without looking at EVERY member on the list.

This is not the first time that "upgrades" have added no new functionality to the site, and have broken what was working right. Is it the goal of your upgrades to make this site harder for everyone to use?

Please restore the group management tool to what we had before. I manage a new alumni group and have lost all of the email addresses. I can't believe this was to be an effective change for LinkedIn users and group participants.

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR LISTENING!

Yes there are teething pains. I've seen funky stuff too when dealing with requests to join this morning.

Yes they could have notified group owners in advance

It used to be impossible to use in the morning, it was so slow. Now much faster

You guys ought to at least look at the site before complaining.

* There is a "Send message" button for every person in the Requests to join list. I'd have preferred access to their email address but I guess that this has been a privacy issue.

* There is a "Flag group as" button for every group. The choices are Inappropriate Group, Inappropriate Logo, Advertisement/Spam, Misrepresentation, Duplicate, Other. Now we can get rid of a lot of the unnecessary groups.

* The ability to choose Approve, Decline or Block for every applicant is a big improvement. You no longer are automatically blocking forever every applicant you reject.

groupowner - I did look at the site and play around with the new functionality for quite awhile before posting my concerns in this forum. Yes, there is a "send message" option, but hitting that option on 50% of the new member requests to my group takes me to an email address of "null". That's a huge problem - I can't communicate with these people. Plus, I now have to click "send message" and send an individual email to each new group member vs. before I could send a bcc email to many new members at once welcoming them to the group (sometimes I get up to 100 requests a day to join my group).

Biggest grief comes from removal of external website link. What's the meaning to the group if there is neither communication within LinkedIn nor on external website. Its just collection of names.
Also second biggest issue is inability to see withdrawn members. With 50 group limit, many members withdrew unwillingly and opportunity to direct them to external group site is lost forever.

Yes, I don't like losing the list of withdrawn members. It was a hole in the privacy.

.

External website link is still there.

On the left there is a yellow button = 'Join Group' and 'Flag group as'

On right there is a box called 'About this Group' which has creation date, type, members, owner, and website

It is not clear to me all of these changes are features, as at the same time

- I have a list of pre-approved members I never pre-approved, all surnames starting with A
- I have a list of people requesting to join, their request dating back to 3/30/1981.

Let's see what happens during the next days ...

It looks like new group requests aren't even being delivered to the group owners any more. My two groups, one of which was just announced to several hundred potential members a few days ago, have been stagnant since the upgrades. NO new member requests have shown up.

I even tried having someone explicitly join one, so I could verify the problem, and there is no new pending member.

Pre-approvals were erased in a group explicitly created for new business development by my company.

None of the management functionality has been restored so far.

I have a very serious group on Linkedin which has been gaining momentum and rolling along wonderfully. The whole process of managing it has now been thrown into chaos since Friday the 15th Aug. I no longer have the e-mails addresses of the members to help steer the groups direction. All my pre-approved members have gone! Some of the members I approved last week are not in the group and are now lost ! I cant sort my members into date joined order which I find really useful for some situations. Something has to be done about this ! I had so much faith in Linkedin but its amazing how fast this ddisappeared.

This is bad. I have been a proponent of LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups from very early on.

Personally, I am *extremely* unhappy about the functionality they have removed from group management. However, I could accept it in a context where we were told in advance of the changes. I'm still not clear how to use decline versus block in the new setup.

What I can *not* accept is such a drastic change being foisted on us with absolutely *NO* prior warning or explanation. I spend several hours each week managing multiple groups and this change has been my worst nightmare.

I can no longer recommend LinkedIn groups to others. =(

Supposedly, there are 13 LinkedIn employees listening and participating in this topic area. Could someone from LinkedIn please say something here?

I recommend that everyone reading this that is as upset as I am take action by updating their status on LinkedIn and elsewhere like so:

Shame on you LinkedIn: http://gsfn.us/t/kd3

That short URL points back to this issue discussion page. Personally, I'm using my twitter, facebook and LinkedIn status to point a finger at LinkedIn about this until it gets addressed in some manner. I recommend that others do the same.

I'm fighting back in the court of public opinion.

Hi Van,

I have done as you suggest. I also changed my status update to be available to EVERYONE instead of just my connections as I previously had it. I also changed my status on FaceBook and Twitter.

It is just outrageous that LI is treating paying (and non-paying) customers this way. Once again they only seem to be interested in TAKING AWAY functionality rather than adding more! I've just never seen anything like it! All of the issues above are so incredibly short-sighted and the fact that they can't bother to respond to this issue here just shines a bright light on their backward sense of "customer service". LinkedIn's classic non-communicative approach just adds insult to injury.

Van, there is only one way to make a change and that is to use the tools at hand Web2.0. Thanks you and I have posted the link above on my Company Blog and I know once It goes to Twitter which I am about to do it will be all over the world in a few minutes. I had one group manager from another prominent group e-mail me over night to say ......"yes I just noticed yet another "anti-social" change Linkedin initiated without communicating to its users." I have such a wonderful collection of high level proponents of Collaborative technologies in my group which is what the groups aim is that once I also let them know how our group is being treated we may need to move the group off Linkedin. Last week I ran a seminar in which we demonstrated the core competencies of Linkedin which I would never have done had I known that they would treat us like this.

I think there are some good points raised in this discussion. There were some improvements in the presentation of the information that is shown, but the now missing features trump all. Of the six primary functions listed in the original post listed, I either used or would use all of them:

1) There is no longer a way to click over to a group's external website from the list of your groups.

2) There is no longer a way for group managers to sort the list of group members by name or by date joined.

3) There is no longer the management option to view/approve 50, 100, or 500 members at a time - now there is just a default view of 20 per page and no matter how many members the group actually has, a group manager/owner can now only see a management list with a maximum of 100 members?!?!??!?!?!

4) There is no longer a way to search your member list by email address?!

5) There is no longer a way to see the members the manager had previously removed from the group (and thus to have the ability to add them back as appropriate).

6) There is no longer a way to see which group members withdrew from the group.

This is the dark side of software as a service. The vendor gets to decide what he wants the program to do and when he want it to do it without care or communication with those who use it most.

Sorry the link is a little bit long so I changed it to Linkedin Group Issue and am trying the HTML feature on this site. Here goes : Linkedin
Group Issue

OK it appears that we may be being heard. When I just exported my Group members it is including the new approved members e-mail addresses. Can one of you please confirm that Linkedin has at least fixed this aspect of the group issue above ?

Hi everyone,

I have forwarded this thread to the team who owns the Groups functionality. I'm hoping they will be able to post here soon. Believe me, our desire is definitely to enhance the functionality for LinkedIn Groups. Feedback on functions that are essential to group moderators is definitely appreciated.

In the meantime, I do know that some of the issues reported here are short terms bugs with the new functionality we rolled out on Thursday night. A couple should already be fixed in production as of Friday night.

Adam

Post Script to the sort by date function:
Within a Group - especially a group that is created to fish for NEW business - I have NO NEED for an alphabetical listing automatically sorted according to connected position: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, group. The intention is to attract to such a group members who fit the target profile (not Steven Burda - haha) and convert them into satisfied customers in my first degree. A satisfied customer needs attention and understanding so there really is no antidote for looking at someone's profile in-depth where I will find the degree of connection I have with him or her.

Automatically sorting group members by degree away from me is an antithetical exercise because people connect to other people (or disconnect) and I immediately "lose track" of everyone who changes degree away from me - like shuffling a pack of cards by throwing them up in the air.

The issues of mass communication of "thank yous" and "please provide more information" and "not at this time" is another headache. I NEED to keep my professional image with the potential clients in my groups - who only have whatever contact they have with me through the group. (Not everyone is an open networker, and LinkedIn's reorganization of Group management features makes it imperative to have everyone at first degree and THEN sort into groups, which goes against the written admonition to "invite only those you know" into the first degree.)

Focus groups, or even setting up a bogus LinkedIn group, would have flagged most of the problems being reported. LinkedIn is engaging in the type of problem where I normally fish for clients. I can fix the LinkedIn communications problem – if anyone is listening over there.

They are acting like friendless know-it-all Nerds who wear pocket protectors, sport monitor-pallor tans and live in their mother's basement - an authority figure who strikes terror because she cleans up the stash of programmer magazines from under the mattress.

I do not like being someone's mother or, for that matter, being a guinea pig.

Everyone has worked all weekend to fix problems (probably why no one's priority was to read user comments until now, which is insulting IMHO) and some problems are fixed on my account:
The 1981 date is history; and
External websites are visible on group profiles;

Some features have been added:
A full business card profile on my 1st degree contacts (date of birth, etc)
Access to Group members via InMail rather than by direct email (counts against your introduction limits – so good luck if you’re a Group manager using LinkedIn for free.)

And other features are removed to my dissatisfaction:
Group Sort by date; and
Group email addresses (visible next to the member)
Group applicants’ email address: useful in mailing list/community building.

I do not use Outlook Express but keep all email on the web - where I have multi-location access 24/7 and suffer fewer security issues. Having the email address show up in Outlook is not a Microsoft twining/con-apt I appreciate or will use. I also use original Windows 98SE OS as a stable affordable platform in Poland with no budget for a non-pirate upgrading of OS. I am not the only one that will have issues as Microsoft technology gets embedded into LinkedIn.

But this is all bundled in the "lack of communication" package we have received: we have been informed of neither the good nor the bad. (These guys really need a solid PR department and a few less programmers.)

Here's a fix for one of the problems

You can set IE (and presumably Firefox) to cause Yahoo! Mail to come up when you click on an email address on a web page such as LinkedIn
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail...
( help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/classic/settings/settings-10.html )

No doubt there is a way to get gmail to come up.

(Aneta, I would bet that this would work in XP or 98. I think that IE has for a long time had a way to redirect certain actions to specific programs.)

However, we still need to be able to see the email addresses in order to manage our groups.

And group management is almost impossible without chronological order Member lists.

I would like to provide feedback regarding the recent changes to the features in the Groups section of LinkedIn.

I am a moderator of my own group, which has close to 600 members now. When I logged into LinkedIn today I noticed that I had several requests to join. Upon entering the requests page I noticed several changes to the formatting; some good and others very poor.

I screen each member of my group carefully, so I was pleased to see the degrees to which I am connected to an interested party right there next to their name. This saves me time as a group moderator.

However, the change that I am most displeased with is that I can no longer see the person's email address. This would help me communicate with LinkedIn members interested in joining my group. Furthermore, it would help me screen applicants to ensure they are who they say they are. I do not allow open networkers in my group nor do I allow people access who have no connection to the main topic of my group.

Also, another feature that is now missing that I really enjoyed was my ability to sort columns by name, date, or email address. This was a very useful feature that I would welcome back.

As an avid LinkedIn user and a paying subscriber I hope that my feedback does not fall on deaf ears. LinkedIn has revolutionized social and business networking and for that I am thankful. However, there have been many changes to the functionality of the website lately that do not favor it's subscribers. May I also suggest a forum for developers and subscribers to suggest and debate changes before they go into production?

Thank you in advance for your attention to my feedback. I welcome any follow up you may have about my comments.

I know I put this in a recent comment but not sure if you all drill down to that level. Here is the response I have had from Linedin :

Response (LinkedIn - Troy (TL)) 08/18/2008 02:37 PM
Dear Luke,

Thank you for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support. We are aware of the bug/issue with the members appearing unapproved. There will not longer be the ability to sort by name or date added. The export function should be working again now. Please try that again and let me know if that is not the case.

Thanks,
Troy L.

Hmmmm....so, the message is: "We don't care that you want to sort effectively, you simply won't be able to because we said so"....Am I reading this correctly Luke? NICE Customer Service!

I have just done a search for group members with the name John and its brought back 3 who don't have John anywhere in the name. I have also just started to spot some terrible issues hence the following e-mail out to someone who luckily I have been corresponding with else would never have noticed:

Hi Sanjeev

Wonderful ! I look forward to hearing the ideas and please drop us a line if you are in Australia and we can hopefully meet up.

On another note: Linkedin have had some shocking issues with their software since last Thursday http://gsfn.us/t/kd3 . I have looked for you on the list of members and cant see you any longer. Would you mind checking to see if they have knocked you out the group during their saga.

Kind regards,

Luke

---------------------------------

He joined last Tuesday the 12th Aug

Adam Nash-

Thank you for your reply.

As to your comment:

"I have forwarded this thread to the team who owns the Groups functionality. I'm hoping they will be able to post here soon. Believe me, our desire is definitely to enhance the functionality for LinkedIn Groups."

The simple version of how to "enhance" something is to ADD extra functionality.

There is absolutely no reason why all of the functionality that HAD been there had to go away.

If there is a reason, state it here. If not, then restore it.

"Feedback on functions that are essential to group moderators is definitely appreciated."

Then why roll out a system wide change without getting any feedback from group owners/moderators IN ADVANCE of the change?

Please restore the link to the group's external website as part of a user's "My Groups" section.

Please restore the ability for group managers to sort the list of group members by name or by date joined.

Please restore the ability to see and work with a a list of more than 20 members or prospective members at a time

Please restore the group manager's ability to actually see the the full list of members (I am only seeing 5 pages of 20 members each even with my groups that have more than 100 Members)

Please restore the visible plain text email addresses next to each group member's name to make it easy for group managers to easily identify and contact members (and don't force us into using LinkedIn's crippled messaging system and don't force us into having to pay for LinkedIn membership upgrades in order to contact more than a handful of our group members at once - and even then have to do it one at a time).

Please restore the visible plain text email addresses next to each prospective group member's name to make it easy for group managers to easily identify, contact, and confirm members (and don't force us into workarounds to have to mouse over the link to see what the email address is or to have clickable email links work with webmail).

Please restore the ability to search your group member list by email address (when a group member emails me, that is the quickest and easiest way to pull up their group information and their profile - not having this feature is crippling for effective communication with group members).

There are many members that I had declined or removed from a group - they used to be on the "Removed" list - which is no longer there. WTF?! Does this mean that they can now rejoin and I have to do all of that work all over again?!

There are members who had withdrawn from the group - they used to be on the "Withdrawn" list - which is no longer there. I had used that list to check to see who was no longer interested in being part of the group so that I could also remove them from the group mailing list - but I can no longer do that either.

Care to explain the new group management "options"?:

* If someone is requesting to join a group, what the heck is the difference between "Decline" and "Block" (yes I can guess, but why doesn't LinkedIn make it clear what the difference is?)

* Similarly, if someone is already a group member, what is the difference between "Delete" and "Block"?

* As mentioned above, the old "Removed" and "Withdrawn" lists have disappeared and have been replace by a "Blocked" list which is also undefined.

'nuff for now.

If what you said is not just public relations BS, then please feel free to back your words up by restoring all of the functionality that group owners/moderators had been using and had been counting on.

Thank you.

And a few more things that slipped by your "quality control team" (did y'all even bother to test this before inflicting it upon your 25 million members?!?!)

I am now unable to upload a new group logo (I had a placeholder logo for one of my groups until I could get a properly sized official one - and now that I do, it simply times out when I try to upload it).

I am unable to remove a group manager who no longer wants to be part of a group (it simply reverts back to the home page with an error message)

Many older requests to join a group do not even have the masked email address - and for people who run groups where the email address domain is THE gating factor (such as corporate or .edu groups), this is plain silly. This was also a big reason to be able to search by email address on the member and prospective member lists - many times the visible email address did not match our records - but we could search with the email address that it should have been (example: first.last@companydomainname.com) and see if that record came up (which would mean that the email address was indeed associated with that person and they simply were not using it as their primary LinkedIn email address).

So where is LinkedIn's response to this???? A REAL response, not jsut some stupid acknoledgement that doesn't ANSWER anything, or FIX anything?

I thought the point of Get Satisfaction was for them to READ and RESPOND!!!! As I write this it says there are 13 employees "listening and participating". How about some participation?????????????

I agree -- why hasn't LinkedIn responded yet? These changes are driving all of us crazy and taking away some of the core utility of LinkedIn.

Consider what happened when Facebook made some unpopular changes -- they CHANGED THEM BACK after users and clients complained, and then issued a very full explanation and apology.

LI is becoming more and more useless. If it continues in this direction, it will soon be FAR past its peak.

Facebook has a _very_good_ PR firm handling their relationships.

LI appears to lump PR into marketing - so, no relationship matters unless it is built on sales architecture.

Please see what I mean (even if you are NOT a PR, just skim through it):
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marke...

I am at a loss. I have just approved 2 new members and after doing so they are still appearing in the "To be approved" List. One of them is someone who was a member before last Thursday who mysteriously fell out of the group and I have had to send an e-mail to ask to reapply.

Am I wasting my time placing my arguments up here on this site. I don't know where to turn? This has now been going on for days and we have had no valid responses.

Luke Grange-

Same here.

I have approved pending group members and they disappear from the pending members list but are not added to the members list - and then some of them appear back on the pending member list again...

I have blocked several people from a group - yet they do not show up on the blocked list...?!

Aside from all of the things that LinkedIn has unnecessarily ripped out of their groups system - it is even more annoying that they also destroyed the core basic functionality of even simply adding and removing people to a group.

Argggh

Update: I now have people contacting me and stating that they requested to join. They do not appear on my list of people to approve!

I have a "haunted" request list too.

A good idea to go to the Members list and export your list of members

I am carefully writing this step-by-step so LinkedIn will *see* the problem. Others may have it too. I am worried about losing my group information - which will cost me my new business development efforts on LinkedIn for this quarter. (September 2008)

I have 3 new members today. The new members only show up when I look at their individual profiles. The logo is there and we share the group.

At the "My Groups" page, when I choose "manage", I do not see the new members included in the group. I see a number that is 3 less than the total number of members. (the lag is in recognizing today's the new members)

I can see these new members (all members) when I choose "members" and I get a listing. Everyone is there.

I still show the 1 that was requesting entry on the " requests to join" page. However, the number of requests to join has subtracted this person from the whole. (Clicking on "requests to join," I see the new member still requesting to join but this person is not counted in the number of requests.)

Pre-approved members show members who have joined. I lost all of these names and had to re-input them over the weekend. To be honest, I am not sure how the pre-approved members feature works (and no one explains it). Should pre-approved members remain pre-approved after they convert to members?

========= My fear
I have asked a few business friends to join because they fit the profile. They have not so far. Okay, I could be paranoid because these are busy people but they would join simply because I asked them and they are helpful. I asked them over a week ago. I really do not want to be perceived as begging for members from anyone - that is not a comfortable image.

Did they join but get erased? Are they blocked by some technical glitch? Is LinkedIn somehow to blame for their lack of membership? (I wonder what they would say if/when I ask them about it down the road?)

Will the new members today get erased from the group before this upgrade is fixed or, finally, downgraded? What will happen to changes since the last back-up when the last back-up is restored?

=========I think there is an aweful lot of fear being expressed in this topic some of it hidden in fancy terms like the writer knows what's going on and some of us admitting we haven't a clue and have fear. What is LinkedIn's response to our fear?

Oh yeah, one more related thing that leaves me feeling VERY UNCOMFORTABLE: I joined my group today. Alot of group owners joined their groups today too.

Just to pile on... In addition to all the above mentioned functionality which was removed with no stated reason or prior communication, I am also experiencing some obvious bugs:
- Discrepencies between the number of requests to join (in the groups page and in the actual approval page itself) and the actual number of names in the list to approve
- Members approved in the list do not "leave" the list. Confusingly, they are listed as "members". I approved them again to no avail. Did they get two e-mails?

I can understand teething problems and a certain time frame to iron them out. I don't understand the lack communication prior to the functionality change or in response to the list of concerns expressed here and elswhere on the web. Whether we pay or not, group adminstrators are some of the most dedicated Linkedin users. Why treat them so poorly?

Since the upgrade I can't add new members to my group. Please restore the old tool.

HELLO EVERYONE READING THIS.

Please post your opinion on my question:
[b] Is LinkedIn's Recent Problems Linked to PR Categorized as Marketing Function? [/b]

Since we are here to not only complain but to find a solution, I suggest posting on LinkedIn itself -- thus notifying our LinkedIn networkwe are are of the problem -- might be as good an idea as posting here.

How long will it take to notify 1 million connections?

This link will take you directly to my question on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marke...

New members are not showing a "joined on date."

Is there going to be a problem because of this? Are new members not OFFICIAL yet? Will they be lost when this problem is finally fixed?

I lost a bunch of members from my group. They just vanished. I contacted them to see if they left. Nope.. Just vanished. Anyone that joined after the so called update is fine. Anyone before that beside myself is gone.

I just submitted the info below in the body of a question to LInkedIn because I don't see any better way to report problems right now. If you are a group manager that thinks new approvals are disappearing, you may want to read this bug report because it explains why searching by name in your member lists may not be doing what you think it is...

In my BayCHI group there are members:

Van Riper, Michael
Van Riper, Mary
Michael, Susan

If I search for Michael, the result is:

Michael, Susan

If I search for Susan, there is no result.

If I search for Van Riper there is no result.

If I search for Riper there are two results:

Van Riper, Michael
Van Riper Mary

Okay. So, it looks like name search is only working on last names for the moment. And even that has problems with last names that are more than one word like mine. This is clearly broken.

Now that groups with more than 100 members have to use name search to see people, this *bug* is freakin a lot of group managers out. Please communicate about this bug ASAP and let us know when it has been fixed. Yikes!

Can I once again congratulate Aneta. Posting a question on Linkedin has started to get a response. If you feel strongly about the issues since the 14th Aug please post your own questions on Linedin and copy the link of this page http://gsfn.us/t/kd3 in it.

Hello everyone,

We're working hard to get problems fixed, and I want to give you our status:

We've pushed fixes for the following problems:

• The "send message" link on the pre-approved should no longer point to a null address


• A bug preventing you from adding new members should be fixed


• You should now be able to remove group managers


• Application/Join dates should be correct


• All pre-approved or current members who had "disappeared" should now be visible

Remember: you might not see some names because the list is short (we're fixing that, too, see below.)

Later this week, we will:

• Show email addresses once again on the requests to join list


• You shouldn't see group owners joining their own groups

Next week:

• Show email addresses once again on the members list


• We will increase the number of members per page to 50, and the total that can be shown to 1000


• Clean up and clarify terminology (delete, block, remove, etc.)

In the coming weeks:

• We'll put the external website link into the list of groups


• Return sorting by name / date


• Add search by email address and first name on members list


• Remove limits on number of names in the list

We've asked two questions in LinkedIn Answers, and we'd love to hear your thoughts:

What are the key features you need to manage your LinkedIn Group?

How can LinkedIn Groups managers best work with each other and LinkedIn?

- Allen

Appears that they changed both the software and the underlying database structure, can't simply roll the software back

One would hope that they get better at testing before releasing stuff in the future

"A bug preventing you from adding new members should be fixed" NOT

Allen, I apricate your reply, but it's still not working

@Luke

When it's not Linux.... :-)

Allen Blue - THANK YOU for a real update that actually addresses some of these issues. Now that I know that someone at LinkedIn is actually paying attention and working on these issues, I will lay off for a while (even though there are still major issues that were not addressed in your reply). Thank you.

Allen,

I just got this reply from Customer Service... doesn't seem to be consistent with your post:

"Next week:
Show email addresses once again on the members list"

Also, it looks like the plan is to restrict how managers can communicate to members as we will no longer be able to email them directly. Cust Serv states that we will have to use the new "messaging system... to communicate with the group members". Why does it feel like ALL of the new features are restrictions and NOT enhancements?? Any chance we can return to the previous, working build??

Details below.

=====================================

Subject
Recent changes = impossible to manage group

Discussion Thread
Response (LinkedIn - Troy (TL)) 08/21/2008 11:34 AM
Dear --,

Thank you for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support. We will be putting into place a messaging system soon that will allow you to communicate with the group members. The email addresses will no longer be visible for the group members. Also, we will be releasing a discussion forum where you will be able to update the entire group on items. Also, we will be expanding the number of group members you an see on the "current members" list.

Please let me know if you have any further questions and thank you for the feedback.

This has once again driven me into panic mode. Why throttle your members by forcing them to use your postal service. These e-mail addresses are critical to nurture my group. Lets call them the API in the application, which you are about to turn off it would seem. This really flies in the face of the Wikinomics group which I run.

Dear Luke,

Thank you for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support. LinkedIn determined it was necessary to apply some temporary limitations to your management tool. This action was done in preparation for upcoming enhancements that we expect will provide even better features than before.

Have a great day Luke!

Regards,

Dennis
LinkedIn Customer Support

I manage a group of over 1,000 people on LinkedIn, and like many other group managers have grown mine from scratch over a good number of months.

This "software change" was either: (1) an unmitgated and historical software development & testing disaster, or (2) a very ...and I mean *very*... intentional restriction on group manager functionality because LinkedIn -- which is founded upon point-to-point connections, not "groups" -- has come to perceive groups in their now prior life as being competitive to their interests.

I personally have no doubt that this was a case of #2. How LinkedIn behaves from this point forward is going to determine whether they succeed or fail, so they'd better make an enormous effort to get in their group manager's good graces.

I have an improper application for the Business Development group from someone. In English-speak, I simply decline the applicant at this time. In LI-terms, I cower in my boots in fear of any online decision.

Under the "new rules," what happens to this application when I decline it?

The application is declined because the person is in no position to give me new business, but this can change over time. Does my judgement to decline now prevent me from re-visiting this applicant and reversing my decision at a latter date?

Or is it so long, farewell, adios, auf wiedersen we will never meet again?

Reply from Linkedin which was sent to my e-mail address for the first time.

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Luke,

First of all, thank you for your management of your group on LinkedIn.

In the past few weeks, we've made some changes with Groups. We introduced a new searchable directory in July, and last Thursday, we made some changes to the group management tools.

Both releases were part of a major change for Groups that we have been planning for several months. We've been talking to both group owners and members and looking at the great groups you have already built. I think we all see great potential for what Groups could be.

But in order to get there, we had to move to a new Groups platform. There was simply no way we could provide the tools you need to serve your members (and ours) with the old system. We made that switch last Thursday.

Some of you wrote in immediately to let us know about problems you encountered after the switch. Thank you for letting us know. I'm happy to say we have some of the problems fixed, but we still have several left to go. We know that these are serious issues and ask for your patience as we work through them.

Here's what we're doing:

This week: Showing email addresses on the requests to join list in the management tool so you can verify where members are coming from and easily send them a welcome message.

Next week: Increasing the number of members shown in the management tool from 100 to 1,000 and increasing the number of members per page from 20 to 50; adding email addresses to the members list; adding date field to the CSV export feature; adding CSV export feature to requests to join list; increasing the CSV export limit from 10,000 to 50,000.

Also next week: We'll enable home pages for group members and some other group collaboration features.

In the weeks following: Sorting by date and name, and expansion to longer member lists, search by email address, and additional management capabilities throughout the rest of 2008.

We're looking forward to the future of LinkedIn Groups and would like you to help shape the direction. I've asked two questions on LinkedIn Answers. Please contribute as I am looking forward to your feedback.

What are the key features you need to manage your LinkedIn group?
How can LinkedIn Groups managers best work with each other and LinkedIn?

Sincerely,

Ben Guthrie
Product Manager, LinkedIn

Here are the URLs on LinkedIn Answers for the two questions:

What are the key features you need to manage your LinkedIn group?
http://tinyurl.com/59w5ut

How can LinkedIn Groups managers best work with each other and LinkedIn?
http://tinyurl.com/6pz54k

Van is correct.

Under the old system, the only choice you had was to put the person on what was called the Removed list and is now called the Blocked list. If they applied again, they were told that they were blocked and that they had to email the Group Manager.

Now, you have two choices in rejecting an application - Block or Decline. With decline it is as if they had never applied in the first place - so they can apply again with no hassle.

Much better.

Looks like they sent the same message to all group managers. I got exactly the same thing, except it addressed me as Bob instead of Luke :-)

The message really didn't say anything that Allen didn't post here yesterday.

Meanwhile, does any one have links to Ben's two questions so we can respond to them? Like everything else, the search on LinkedIn didn't find them for me, or at least not in the first page or two of over 50 pages of responses...

In reply to Bobs Post. Here are links to the two questions: