Topic: Owners and Moderators
Protect your list by creating a backup owner
On Yahoogroups, you can now have co-owners as well as moderators. If you go to your member list, click on Edit for any list member that has a Yahoo ID linked to their membership, you'll see these two options:
[ Change to Moderator ] - Moderators can change delivery and posting settings for individual members. Additional privileges can be granted as well if needed.
[ Change to Owner ] - Owners have complete control over all features and settings of the group and can delete the group.
(If the list member doesn't have a Yahoo ID linked to their list membership, you won't see the "Change to Owner" option, instead you'll see a note that they must have a Yahoo ID in order to be an owner.)
It's now possible to have real co-owners, so if one owner drops off the face of the earth, the group isn't left to rot (assuming of course that the original owner did appoint a co-owner). Co-owners automatically have all the moderator privileges, it's all little green circles, instead of check boxes.
This can be a great thing to help prevent losing control of your groups. All listowners should create a separate Yahoo ID and email address, subscribe it to your group (set it to NoMail) and make it an Owner. Then if ever you lose access to your primary Yahoo ID or primary email address, you'll have that backup Yahoo ID to get back in control of your group.
If you make someone a co-owner, then when you go to their member detail page, those two options above change to this:
[ Change to Member ] - Members are basic participants in the group. They can post and receive messages and access web features made available to them.
[ Change to Moderator ] - Moderators can change delivery and posting settings for individual members. Additional privileges can be granted as well if needed.
So one owner can change another owner back to just a moderator or just a member. If you click on "change to moderator", then on the next page, all the moderator privileges checkboxes are checked, so you'd need to uncheck any that you didn't want them to have and click Save Changes.
The one hazard is that ANY co-owner can make any other co-owner just a moderator or just a member again. So if you make someone a co-owner and then have a falling out, they can remove you as owner, as moderator and as a member of the group and then ban you. So as with creating moderators, caution should be exercised.
Yahoo will also send out a notice to the list member when you promote them to co-owner or moderator or demote them to moderator or member.
Last updated on June 2, 2004 11:35 PMWhen I used to go to my yahoogroups Groups Home page, along with the three groups I moderate (two of which I own), there was also listed a group for Moderators. At some point I must have deleted that group from my list of groups, which obviously cut off access to that group. I would like to reestablsh my membership and access to that group, if this is possible. But I cannot find any link to it at the yahoogroups web site. Can you help me?
Posted by: at August 4, 2004 08:06 PMIf you're talking about the old official moderators list that eGroups used to post announcements to, that's long gone. The list still exists but Yahoo doesn't post to it anymore and the group's description now says "this list is closed". I unsubbed after that note went up so I don't have the url either but there's no point in joining it.
Posted by: texas critter at August 4, 2004 11:26 PM