50 Ways To Leave Your Lover

In this case, it only takes one, but the decision has been forced upon us by the continued saga with Yahoo Groups.  As of today, we are no longer accepting messages posted to Yahoo Groups and are actively encouraging users to join us at the new site of our PERS Oregon Discussion Group located on Google.  You can get there easily https://groups.google.com/d/forum/persoregondiscussion .  You will need to register.  If you run into difficulty, contact one of the group moderators back channel (via email) and we can assist.  You do not need Google Mail to participate.  You merely have to register and provide the same information that you are required to provide the first time you try to use a closed group at Yahoo.  There are still clean-up efforts going on and we will keep the Yahoo site open for members indefinitely as the archives of nearly 6 years of posts are there.  Until we can figure out a way to capture that archive for use elsewhere, we feel obligated to maintain the Yahoo Group at a minimal level so that the archives are available.  Please keep in mind that to access the archives, you have to remain a member of the Yahoo Group, which is why we discourage users from necessarily closing their Yahoo accounts or resigning from the group.  You may, if you wish, but should you ever want to access those archives, like looking up something said two years ago about a particular issue that is reoccurring today, this would be the way to do it.

The new Google Group has a lot to like about it.  There are some operational differences, but none very complicated that users will find the interface very different from the old Yahoo.  If you have any problems, all of the moderators are around and with access to the Internet to help you out.  We are trying to make this transition as seamless as possible under the circumstances.  So, if you point your browser at the address hyperlinked above, or go to the left side of this blog and look for the very top link under Links, it will take you to the new group.  The link to Yahoo is gone and it isn't coming back.  As of early today, we had already gotten 375 users to move over. There are still slightly less than 500 members not accounted for.  If you are one of those, and you are still interested in the real-time discussion of PERS issues, PERS Oregon Discussion on Google is the place to be.

It is probably going to require some expensive software to try to capture the archives at Yahoo.  If you want to help out with that project, you can feel free to use the donate button here to help out.  No matter what we do, this move has been extremely time consuming, the fight with Yahoo tiring, and all of the moderators are pretty worn out from the recurring and unrelenting battle against spam.  We won, but as they say, it was a pyrrhic victory.  Our win came at the cost of the group and shutting down all posting without moderation.

I, along with the group moderators, look forward to seeing you over at Google (which also hosts this blog) Groups.  I think you will like the format, and some of the options we have that we didn't at Yahoo.  Again, any difficulty accessing the group, check with one of the moderators - addresses still posted on the Yahoo Groups site.