Yahoogroups is dead. Check out groups.io and the migrated memoQ peer support!

A few weeks ago I saw a notice that Yahoo is taking down its old groups facility, which, back in the day, was like a jazzier version of the old listserves. At the beginning of my career as a commercial translator, I found the translation-related groups there to be enormously helpful, and I met many colleagues who were mentors to me and remain friends to this day. Unfortunately, some years ago, Yahoo reorganized the interface of the groups feature so that I often could not figure out how to use it any more, so aside from occasionally peeking at mailed digests of the content in half a dozen groups, I haven't participated actively in many years.

So I really wasn't sad to learn that YahooGroups are about to be axed. However, the need for better organized sites of this kind has hardly gone away. Although for many organizations and interests, Facebook has come to dominate group communications, Facebook sucks like a Kremlin vacuum cleaner from Hell when it comes to managing content for user advice and Help. Even users who are not lazy find it difficult to search for solutions already posted, so one tends to see the same help requests every week, sometimes the same issue more than once in a day. The archives of a good listserve are usually much better sources of help.

So I was pleased to hear that the YahooGroup for memoQ peer-to-peer support had migrated to a new platform at https://groups.io/g/memoQ/. And I hope other good CAT tool support groups do the same (feel free to post any such links in the comments).

Even if Facebook were not the cesspit of fake news, political and social manipulation that threatens the stability of so many countries around the world as well as the physical safety of everyone (live streaming mass slaughter isn't my idea of fun on a Saturday night, but then I am a bit old-fashioned), it is unlikely that it will ever become a good platform for the kind of technical information sharing among professional peers that we need. YahooGroups met that need once, and I think that these new incarnations on Groups.io may do a better job with less (or no?) trashy ad spam.

If you are a memoQ user, I encourage you to join the new group if you were not already on the old YahooGroups platform. (If you were, you have probably already been migrated by the helpful moderators.) Contribute your expertise, and ask the questions that need asking and answering for all of us to move forward with the technical challenges of the tools we use.