Dear Members,
Starting today (Thursday, April 28th) and continuing over the next week, we will be transitioning the TVCC Forum from Yahoo Groups to Google Groups. Effective Thursday, May 5th, 2016, the Google Group will be the new club forum for TVCC. At that point, no one will be able to post to the Yahoo Group, but current members will be able to view past messages.
If you are currently a member of the Yahoo Group and have an up-to-date club membership, you will be added to the Google Group within the next week. You will receive an email welcoming you to the new Google Group. If you do not receive your welcome email by Friday, May 6th, 2016 and you are both a current member of TVCC and a Yahoo Group member, please contact the moderator to ensure that no errors were made.
If you are not currently a member of the Yahoo Group and wish to join the Google Group, visit https://groups.google.com/d/forum/tvcc-forum to request to join the TVCC Forum Google Group.
The Google Group will have the same functionality as the Yahoo Group (email and web forum, digest email option), but will provide a cleaner, more updated, and easier to manage platform. You will still be able send emails to the group from your normal email just like you did with Yahoo.
Teri Zur has volunteered to be the moderator of the new group. Please join me in welcoming her to this position; we are grateful for her willingness to take on this responsibility. Feel free to contact her at RiverGeek.Teri@gmail.com if you have any issues or concerns. A huge thank you also goes to Dave McConnell, who has been moderating the Yahoo Group for many years.
Now that the housekeeping is out of the way, you may want to know more about why we are making this change.
Over the last 6 months, the TVCC Board has been discussing how we communicate as a club. This has included the Facebook, the new website, emails, and of course, the Yahoo Group.
We have learned through both the survey sent this winter and recent discussions on the Yahoo Group (topic: Ford Pintos) about how truly important the email/web forum is for our membership.
At the same time, Yahoo Groups isn’t the most current platform, and as we’ve seen demonstrated recently (which was truly a coincidence), has some technical issues and is difficult to manage from an administrator standpoint.
Based on these discussions and challenges, the Board decided at our April meeting to move forward with transitioning from Yahoo to Google.
Additionally, the TVCC Board already has a Google account, and that account will be the owner of the new Google Group. This means that board members all have administrator access to back up our volunteer moderator, and when a new moderator takes over one day, the transition will be very easy.
Finally, TVCC understands the value of the archives of the Yahoo Group both to current and new members. I am currently working on a solution to capture the archives of the Yahoo Group and make them available to club members. For the time being, you will still be able to log in to the Yahoo Group to view past messages.
Teri and I are doing what we can to make this transition as painless as possible, please feel free to contact either of us with any questions or concerns.
SYOTR,
Meryl Stark
Teri Zur