We use Google Groups for a non-profit I'm involved with and it works well. Not sure on a replacement that will work well for us yet.
Checkout Topicbox by Fastmail... fills the niche perfectly!
Google Groups has been left to die
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Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#22Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#23I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.
Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software) principles.
Yeah, I’m not a web dev, but I assumed there were one or more technical limitations that led to its decline.
I liked the interface, and the familiarity when seemingly every small-to-medium forum online was built on it.
Plus they were all scrapable. There’s a ton of information that’s hard or impossible to find now that these conversations are typically siloed in slack or discord.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#24Google Groups performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against USENET, by way of their acquisition of DejaNews and then implementing their own forum/mailing list interface on top if it. But, I wonder how many communities that are using Google Groups would be suitably served by falling back to USENET. I suppose it would require some updates to both NNTP server software to be easier to administer (if yo…
There would also be the question how to archive old messages – i.e. one of the main problems Dejanews originally solved for the Usenet community.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#25I would love to hear some recommendations for ways to build communities and discussion forums that are a bit more robust.
Been seeing a minor resurgence of phpBB sites, as a reaction to the problems inherent in Discord and Reddit. When I research forum software, it seems like the space has more or less stagnated over the past 20 years, except for a couple paid offerings (like Discourse, which is $50/month).
Some of the options I like in this space are newsgroups, majordomo mailing lists (with public archives), and phpBB. These pieces of software all had a long lifespan, and have some good qualities when it comes to archiving discussions and ease of use. Obviously, newsgroups are no longer a viable option. It does seem like we could do better these days, without outsourcing our communities to Reddit or Discord.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#26Google groups will never die because Google uses it to manage internal mailing lists.
Couldn't they just bring it internal? It must cost a good deal of money to keep it going, even if its not actively worked on.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#27I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.
Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software) principles.
In fairness, early PHP often made it much easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing while simultaneously targeting beginner web developers.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#28Google Groups performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against USENET, by way of their acquisition of DejaNews and then implementing their own forum/mailing list interface on top if it. But, I wonder how many communities that are using Google Groups would be suitably served by falling back to USENET. I suppose it would require some updates to both NNTP server software to be easier to administer (if yo…
Just like when Google performed the classic embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver against GOPHER.
Re: Google Groups has been left to die
#29What's really crazy to me is that I'm on a local Google Group for the cycling community in the city I'm in.
I somewhat regularly fish stuff out of my Gmail spam folder that went from
Someone's personal gmail account -> Google Group -> My Gmail account.
The message never left Google's infrastructure, and it's still being flagged as spam! They should have a lot of insight into those messages and be able to ascertain that it is not spam.