Message Moderation post 2019

Although not mentioned in the help page announcing the Changes to Yahoo Groups, nor any of the emailed notifications, nonetheless the ability for group owners and moderators to moderate message postings has been (mostly) dismantled.

Site Changes

On 2019-12-16 Yahoo apparently made a sweep through Yahoo Groups setting each group to Unmoderated. Some group owners/moderators took note of this change and used the Moderation tab of the Control Panel to switch their group back to Moderated or New User Moderated. Attempting to access the Pending Messages page yielded an error message: “The item you are looking for is not available.” Moderation by email remained working.

It was noticed on 2019-12-17 that Yahoo had removed the checkboxes for Moderator Notifications from the subscription pages of moderators or owners. It is unknown whether all mods/owners now receive all notifications, or whether each mod/owner is now locked in to whatever notifications they had been set to receive. Of note, this may mean that some group mods/owners can no longer approve or reject messages (if they don't receive the MODERATE notifications).

On 2019-12-18 Yahoo removed the Moderation tab from the Control Panel, effectively locking groups into whatever setting they then had.

It has subsequently been noticed that the Posting Privileges options for individual members are now limited to just two:

• Default Group Policy
• Override - can't post messages

It is unknown if members that had been set to one of the other Overrides (e.g. Moderated) have retained their prior setting or have been converted to Default Group Policy, though that seems likely.

Residual Moderation

For groups that are still set to Moderated, or where some members have the Override: Moderated Posting Privilege, the only means of approving or rejecting their messages is by email: reply to the MODERATE notification to approve the message; forward the notification to an address specified in the notice to reject the pending message.

In the examples below, substitute your group's name in place of "GroupManagersForum".

Note: a notice with the Subject "Pending activity for GroupManagersForum group will soon expire" won't allow you to approve or deny any messages. The links in that message are useless because they link to pages which have been dismantled.

Here is an example of the notification that you need. Note particularly the instructions which I've higlighted. As with other notices, the links (http: URLs) are useless because the target pages have been dismantled.

Subject: MODERATE -- shalf@example.com posted to GroupManagersForum

From: Yahoo Groups Notification <GroupManagersForum-accept-g3nhcmbpxncgg3rxmgrg0qj0waea@yahoogroups.com>

Hello,

A message has been sent to the GroupManagersForum group from

  shal@example.com

A complete copy of this message has been attached for your convenience.

This message requires your approval for one of the following reasons:
* Your group is set to moderate all messages from this user, OR
* Your group is set to moderate messages from all users

To approve or reject this message using the web, please visit:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GroupManagersForum/pending?view=1&msg=58325

To approve this message using email, reply to this message. You do not
need to attach the original message, just reply and send.

To reject this message using email, forward this message to

GroupManagersForum-reject-g3nhcmbpxncgg3rxmgrg0qj0waea@yahoogroups.com

NOTE: The pending message will expire after 14 days. If you do not
take action within that time, the pending message will be automatically
rejected.  Yahoo Groups does this to maintain a high quality of
service for our users.

Thank you for choosing Yahoo Groups.

Regards,

Yahoo Groups Customer Care

Your use of Yahoo Groups is subject to https://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/terms/

The attached message is in the form of a .eml file, which is the raw message content (aka "View Source" or "Show Original" format). Your email interface may or may not have a convenient way to display the message content to you. Both Thunderbird and the Gmail web interface can be set to show you the attached message inline below the notification text.