linkedout's dashboard

Ben - Thank you for the quick, informative, and helpful post. I now understand this much better. My apologies for not fully understanding the change. Thanks!

Steve Ganz - That is excellent news - thank you for sharing! Might there also be a way to have a moderated discussion (meaning posts would be held in a moderation bin for approval before going live?) Thanks!

Steve Ganz - thank you for your reply. Does removing a person from the group also remove the messages that they posted to the discussion area of that group? Thanks!

Steve Ganz - thank you for your reply, but you and the blog post you pointed to completely ducked the main point of this thread (see the title: "Discussion is the new SPAM") - namely, that without any provision whatsoever for even a basic level of discussion moderation, you have just created a haven for spam. So, as a group manager, is my only option to combat spam simply to turn the discussion "feature" off?

Yep, it appears that they snuck in a new limit without telling anyone - best that I can tell, you can now only own and/or manage up to ten groups in total.

At least, so far, they did not force you to cut it down to just ten - but if you have ten or more groups that you own and/or manage you can't create a new group or be added as a manager to an existing group.

It would have been nice if they could have been bothered to extend the same "courtesy" to the "fifty groups in total" limit (meaning for you to be able to keep all of the groups that you signed up for without them going into your account and deleting all of the recent groups you signed up for - translation: the groups that you have the most current interest in - until you got down to the new 50 group limit).

Quick note: I started a new thread specifically for the New LinkedIn Groups "Discussion Feature" Issues - please click here to go that thread...

Adam Nash - Thanks again!

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.

Adam Nash-

Thank you again.

Allen Blue's reply on a different thread addresses much of this.

It is a huge relief that it finally appears that y'all are indeed listening and working to make things right.

Thank you.

Adam Nash-

Thank you for your reply and for a real answer.

I agree that the upload page is a minor point and your latest explanation does make sense.

And, in the end, this is just one of many many other issues which are significantly more important, but at least one of them has now been addressed. Thank you.

I appreciate your comment of "We're real people here, too, and I think you'll find that a more civil approach will yield a much better discussion" - but please note that if LinkedIn had taken that approach with its users before these changes were made, none of this "discussion" would have been necessary in the first place.

As to your point of "I understand your frustration with some of the recent issues, particularly around groups" - thank you again.

Now is there any chance that anyone at LinkedIn will actually help and do something to fix the problems instead of just scolding us for jumping up and down to try to get your attention to give you the gift of the details of how your last "upgrade" is serious impacting your users?

Thank you in advance for giving me hope that I will not have to be as provocative to get LinkedIn to pay attention to the serious problems its last "upgrade" has created for its users.

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

Chris Richman - thank you for your reply, but as to your point of "a lot of our less-technical members were having problems with that page because it's just a big text box without much guidance on what to do with it" and that is why you removed this useful feature = Wrong Answer.

This is simply another case of LinkedIn unnecessarily yanking away useful functionality from their users.

If "a lot of our less-technical members were having problems with that page because it's just a big text box without much guidance on what to do with it." the Correct Answer is to provide some additional guidance on that page - it is not to remove it entirely.

Also, you already had the "enter six email addresses in one field at a time" page as the default page - so those mythical users who had a problem with the "big text box" page had to have first clicked past your default page to get to the "big text box" page - so your whole line of argument is BS (because the only people on the "big text box" page would thus have been advanced users who were looking for such a tool or "less-technical" users who were confused with the default "enter six email addresses in one field at a time" page in the first place - so, by killing this useful feature you have, by definition, not solved the supposed "less-technical members" problem and have only made it worse for everyone else).

Having a text entry form along with a file upload form costs LinkedIn exactly zero (you already had it in your system!) and provided a useful tool for your users.

Please restore it and please stop patronizing your users by trying to convince them that less functionality is better and that they should be happy that you replied to them after they had to resort to posting here to get a "work-around" tip for something that they should not have had to "work-around" in the first place.

Also, please feel free to provide some real answers over on the New LinkedIn Group Issues thread. Thank you.

Christina - thank you for your apology for your answer - but it would be much more helpful if you instead actually answered the points I and others have raised on this and other related threads. Thank you.

Christina-

Thank you for taking the time to reply, but as to your point of "we did have to scale back functionality in order to get it out there" = Wrong Answer.

Unless you have the most incompetent engineering team of all time, there is absolutely no reason why you had to kill simple functional things like being able to sort your group's member list by name or when someone joined the group (click here for the full GetSatisfaction thread on all of this).



As to your point of "In the past, groups had one important role, which was to allow users to add a group affiliation to your profile, to improve our professional reputation. This also enhanced the group's reputation by having a lot of smart people publicly announcing an association" = Wrong Answer.

Many group managers built vibrant and valuable communities with the limited group tools that were available - tools that you have now removed because of your preconceived bias that groups were only an "affiliation badge." Nice of you to so callously kill something that you couldn't even bother first informing yourself about.



As to your point of "In a couple weeks, you will begin to see new, richer functionality" = Wrong Answer.

If the new version is so great, tell us why it is so great and why you needed to have a few weeks of totally crippling the old groups system before you finally get around to putting the new system in place.

And after the utter fiasco of what has already been done to groups (stuff that has clearly been done with no thought to or consultation with actual group managers - and which is ridden with bugs), why exactly should we "keep the faith until labor day"?!



As to the "PM for groups... working insanely hard right now" = Wrong Answer.

The "insanely hard work" should have come BEFORE changes were made that effect 25 million people and the tens of thousands of group managers (aka the people who have worked hard to provide extra value to LinkedIn users).

If y'all had actually done the work to talk to group managers BEFORE you made these inane and unnecessary changes, if y'all had actually done usability testing BEFORE you made these inane and unnecessary changes, if y'all had actually tested for bugs before inflicting these inane and unnecessary changes on 25 million people, then your PM should have instead been able to be on vacation right now, knowing that the groups system rollout wasn't going to be a complete travesty that required insanely hard work AFTER things were messed up because the "insanely hard work" that should have been put in BEFORE the rollout was not done.

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).

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.