Over the next several months, we'll be migrating our 250+ help forums in 20+ languages to the new Google Product Forums platform. Built on the new Google Groups, Google Product Forums provide users with a fresh interface and robust features for asking questions and discussing our products.
The new platform brings some exciting new features to our forums. For example, you can now select between starting a discussion or asking a question, quickly indicate your own interest in a question that has been asked by voting "Me too!," and easily share a topic with your circles on Google+.
We already have Google Product Forums live in 10 languages and will be launching more languages rapidly over the coming weeks. Please have a look around: Arabic, Czech, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Vietnamese.
We hope you enjoy Google Product Forums and thank you for your patience as we migrate our legacy forums to the new platform over the coming months.
The Google Product Forums team
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Recently we launched some updates to Google Groups, including a new, cleaner interface. Well, now we’re making an update to how we communicate updates and news about Groups. We’ve realized that we don’t have regular enough updates to warrant a standalone blog, so we won't be posting here any longer. Going forward, look for our updates right in groups.google.com.
Thanks to all our readers!
Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog Team -
Over the next several months, we'll be migrating our 250+ help forums in 20+ languages to the new Google Product Forums platform. Built on the new Google Groups, Google Product Forums provide users with a fresh interface and robust features for asking questions and discussing our products.
The new platform brings some exciting new features to our forums. For example, you can now select between starting a discussion or asking a question, quickly indicate your own interest in a question that has been asked by voting "Me too!," and easily share a topic with your circles on Google+.
We already have Google Product Forums live in 10 languages and will be launching more languages rapidly over the coming weeks. Please have a look around: Arabic, Czech, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Vietnamese.
We hope you enjoy Google Product Forums and thank you for your patience as we migrate our legacy forums to the new platform over the coming months.
The Google Product Forums team -
We’re happy to announce some of the latest design and feature improvements we have made to the new Google Groups. These changes are based on feedback we have received from you; we hope they will improve your discussion experience.
- Spam improvements: Starting next week, we will remove the option to “Add members directly” to googlegroups.com groups since spammers have unfortunately abused this feature. Group owners will still be able to invite you to join their groups and you will have to accept their invitation before you start participating in and receiving messages from the group. Learn more here: http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46373
- Support for more languages - The new Google Groups is now available in 40 languages. You can set your preferred interface language by visiting: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en and picking your preferred language using the drop down selector.
- Topic starring - We heard that you’d like a better way to keep track of the discussions you care about most. Groups already allows you to follow your favorite topics by subscribing to email updates on individual topics. Now we’ve added the ability to star your favorite topics for easy viewing. Your starred topics can be viewed by clicking the Starred link on the left pane, similar to Google Docs. Learn more about this feature here: http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1304359
- Simplified discussion interface - Based on your feedback, we have taken steps to reduce clutter and simplify the new Groups. You told us that the topic list is hard to follow in very active groups, as newly-posted (and updated) topics appeared at the top of the list. Now, you will see a notification when topic updates are available and updated topics will be displayed only when you click on this notification.
We have made other subtle improvements to the discussion experience. For example, when viewing a topic you will notice that the message actions are now wrapped into a drop-down menu on the top right corner of the message, much like they are in Gmail.
We’re also working to add the +1 button to public messages and topics in Google Groups, making it easy to recommend your favorite discussions to your friends. Stay tuned for these updates and more coming soon from Google Groups!
This is only the beginning - we’re making even more design improvements to make Groups more focused, elastic & effortless. We are also building more community forum features into Groups. Our newest Google product forums, the Google+ discussion forum and Chromebook Central forum feature some of these improvements including:- Topic categories that allow for better organization of discussions
- Questions & Answers that offer the ability to classify topics as discussions or questions, and to rate answers and mark a response as the best answer.
- Badges that give group participants a sense of identity within the group.
- The Google Groups Team -
In September 2010, we announced that Groups would first disable the creation of files and pages and then completely turn off the feature in February 2011.
We noticed that some of you had not taken advantage of the zip-download functionality to export all the pages and files from your groups. Because we know this information is important to you, we’re giving you the opportunity to migrate your data one more time. Starting today, we will re-enable the zip-download functionality so that you can save your pages and files to your computer.
You will be able to download your pages and files from now until August 31, 2011 by visiting your group home page (https://groups.google.com/group/yourgroupname) and clicking on “Download Pages” or “Download Files.”
After this, we will remove the feature permanently.
Thanks for your feedback, and for using Google Groups.
The Google Groups Team -
It has been an exciting few months since we launched the new Google Groups. We love your feedback and are excited about switching over to the new interface.
In preparation for a full transition, we will be making some changes to the old Google Groups in the coming months:
- Google Groups-specific profiles will no longer be supported. Instead, you will be able to use the new Google Groups to (optionally) link your new and improved Google profile with your groups. Starting July 1st 2011, you will not be able to make changes to your Groups profile. Your profile information will be available for export from your profile page until November 1st 2011. This change will not affect the nicknames you might have chosen for yourself to participate in groups. It will only affect the custom profile fields, such as your photo, location, and occupation. More details are available here: http://www.groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46240.
- Message ratings, which are a rarely-used feature in the old Google Groups, will be disabled to make way for a better rating and sharing system to be launched soon in the new Google Groups. Effective today, per message ratings will be disabled.
- The Google Groups Team -
Update: This issue has now been resolved. Thank you for your patience!
Over the past 24 hours, some Groups users have experienced intermittent errors while attempting to post messages to the web interface. The team is working hard to investigate & rectify this issue. Email delivery to these groups is unaffected, so on groups that allow email participation, we suggest posting and receiving messages via email.
We apologize for the inconvenience and will write back as soon as we fix the problem.
The Google Groups Team -
We have received reports from users that they're seeing the following error on the top message bar, when trying to access certain parts of the new Google Groups:
"An error (#383 or #401) occurred while communicating with the server. Please try again."
We're currently investigating this issue and working on fixing it. We'll provide an update here once everything is back to normal. Sorry for the inconvenience! -
Last month, we announced the preview release of the new Google Groups. Since then, we have received over a thousand suggestions and feedback reports through our Product Ideas page and in-product feedback.
Based on your feedback, we have been investigating bugs, working on fixes, and implementing new features. We’re happy to announce this first round of updates.
The following issues have been addressed in a recent release of the new Groups:
- Fixed: Some group owners and post authors were unable to delete posts.
- Fixed: Mysterious appearance of a group with no title or description in the “My Groups” list.
- Fixed: Issues with posting to Usenet groups from the new Groups.
- Fixed: Issues with posting new messages and replies to moderated groups.
- Fixed: Starred/favorited groups list were reset upon refreshing the page.
- New: The ability to ‘Reply to author’ of a message has been added to the new Groups.
We’ve also heard your feedback on a few other features that we’re actively working to improve:
- We’ve received reports that the Groups UI does not render non-English languages correctly. We will roll out a number of fixes over the coming weeks that will address these problems.
- One of the top suggestions we received on the Product Ideas page, was to move group administration tasks to the new interface and make them more prominent. While the new Groups is designed to the shift the focus on to your discussions, we’re working on making sure that you can find administrative tasks quickly as well. We will have more updates on this front in the coming months.
- We have also consistently received feedback about reducing spam in Google Groups. Reducing spam is a very high priority for us, and we look forward to rolling out several improvements in the next few weeks.
Thank you for the overwhelming response so far! Please continue to send us your thoughts & feedback as we work on improving the new Google Groups.
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Millions of people around the world use Google Groups to power discussions with the groups and communities they care about. We have been working hard to improve this experience, and today we are happy to announce a sneak preview of the brand new Google Groups.
The new Google Groups lets you quickly find and browse the content you care about. Your favorite groups are always available in the navigation bar on the left. Using keyboard shortcuts, you can speed through discussions to get to the ones that interest you most. (Tip: Hit “?” to see a list of shortcuts).
Now you can also create rich, expressive posts using the revamped composer. If you choose, you can share more about who you are by linking your Google profile with a group, too. Finally, you’ll be able to stay in the loop even when you’re on the move, with our new mobile browser experience.
Over the next week, when you sign in to Google Groups, you’ll see a link to a preview the new Google Groups. Once there, you can make it your default view (and you can switch back to the old version if you ever need it).
We’re excited about sharing these improvements with you, but this is just a start; we’re working on improved spam controls, moderation, search, and other features to make Google Groups the best way to engage in discussions. We also want to hear your thoughts, ideas, and any issues you encounter, so please contribute to our Product Ideas page. -
We announced last week that pages and files will be going away in February. Many of you have asked for more detailed help on moving your content to Google Sites, so here are a few quick steps to move your pages to a Google Site.
- In one window of your browser (e.g. Firefox or Chrome), create a new site. You can do this by going to http://sites.google.com.
- Click the Create a page button on your site and click the Edit HTML icon on the editor to open the "Edit HTML" code window.
- In a different browser window, open one of the pages you’ve downloaded from Groups in the zip file. These .txt files should contain the HTML code for your pages.
- Copy all the contents on that page and paste it the HTML code window on your Sites page. (Note: Links that point to Groups Pages & Files content will need to be updated. If you have images that were hosted on Groups, you will need to remove them from the code and then upload those images on the Sites editor.)
- Click Update to save your changes.
