February 12, 2019
To: All existing
members of the Amel Yacht Owners Group on Yahoo!
From: Bill Rouse
In 2002, “Closereach” founded the Amel Yacht Owners Group on
Yahoo Groups platform with a handful of members. Our group grew in membership
to the hundreds when Closereach retired from our group and turned the group’s
ownership over to Jose Luis Isasi. Jose led the group to over 1000 members and
in 2018 turned the ownership over to me.
In the beginning and through a number of years, the Yahoo
platform worked well for most of our members. However, as technology
progressed, Yahoo Groups did not, and many of the members began complaining of
numerous shortcomings with the Yahoo platform. Additionally, Yahoo simply
stopped supporting the groups about 2 years ago and left known bugs and
problems continue to irritate all of us. Lastly, we cannot ignore the numerous
rumors about Yahoo and what they may do with the Yahoo Groups, especially since
they no longer support their group platform.
Groups.io is a new and
different platform for groups like ours. Although they offer a “free” group
platform, it is not for us because we need more features and we are larger than
the small groups the free platform is intended for. Groups.io has a PREMIUM platform
which is generally designed like the Yahoo platform that we are accustomed to,
but Groups.io has search ability that works, and many other tools that work.
The Amel Owners Group moderators and I have been testing
Groups.io for several weeks and made the decision to move the Amel Yacht Owners
Group to Groups.io. Hopefully the transition will go as smooth as possible, but
I am sure that there will be issues. We are moving all of our data with us.
There is a minimal cost involved ($110/year), which Amel School will pay for 5
years. I believe that this will give us plenty of time to plan for the years
after the first 5. For instance, the Nordhavn Group moved from Yahoo, supported
by members and shortly after the move Nordhavn’s parent company agreed to pay
all of the costs.
The Moderators of our Group will remain: Mark McGovern, SM
CARA, Mark Erdos, SM CREAM PUFF, Danny SIMMS, SM OCEAN PEARL, and Gary Wells,
SM ADAGIO
You will need to:
Use a different email address when sending an email. Use main@AmelYachtOwners.groups.io
Go to the new Amel Yacht Owners website address https://amelyachtowners.groups.io/g/main/topics
and establish a log-in by clicking on “Log
In” in the upper right and follow the instructions for “Forgot your password,
or don't have one yet?”
I hope that you all will enjoy the new platform.
Bill Rouse
