Google Groups Features and Restrictions Examination

Introduction

This document shortly describes some of the features, requirements and restrictions in Google Groups. It also tells what Google Groups doesn't have and some historical information about Google Groups and the Usenet.

Features

Google Groups offers many features for the user and for a discussion group. The user has a main page having for example a list of groups that person has subscribed to and information about recent activity. The user may also have a profile and favorites. A discussion group can have for example discussions, pages, files, feeds and settings for who can view the group, who can participate in discussions and settings for changing the appearance of the group.

User

The user has access for example to his/her own main page, profile, favorites, membership management page, group directory, and of course to thousands of discussion groups.

User's Main Page

When you are signed in to Google Groups and you go to the Google Groups main page, at the top of the page you should see the "My Groups", "Favorites", "Profile", "Help", "My Account", and "Sign out" links. In the middle of the page you should see a list of the Google Groups discussion groups and Usenet newsgroups you have subscribed to. The group list should also show information about how many times a group has been viewed and how many new messages have been posted since you last visited the group. Below the group list there should be a small "Manage my memberships" link and under that the "Explore groups" area where you can search for a group or go to the group directory. And at the bottom right hand side there is the "My profile & stats" area, which shows some statistics about your activity for the last seven days.

Favorites

On the "Favorites" page you can see the list of discussions you have marked to follow via web or email or both. Maximum number of bookmarked discussions seems to be 200 (February 2007).

Profile

On the "Profile" page you can see your profile information including list of all the groups you have participated in inside the selection box, a list of some of the most recent discussions and a some sort of calendar view of all your messages sorted by month and year. You may change some of the information (location, web address, etc.) by clicking the "edit" link at the top of the page. The maximum dimensions for the profile picture seem to be 50 pixels x 50 pixels.

Manage My Memberships

On the Manage my memberships page you can set your nickname and subscription type for all the groups you have subscribed to. If you don't want to be invited or added to groups, you can select the appropriate settings and push the "Save invitation preferences" button below them.

Group Directory

On the Group directory page the groups have been organized by topic, region, language, activity and number of members. If you only want to look at the Usenet newsgroups, click the "Browse all of Usenet" link.

Discussion Group

A Google Groups discussion group has for example a web site with a main page, about page, a URL (web address), an email address, feeds and members. Depending on how the group is configured, the group also has sections for discussions, editable pages, uploaded files, and members. For group owners and managers there is also a section for settings.

Group Main Page

The main page of a group shows the name of the group, sections for the group (discussions, pages, files), some group info, and links to the about page, membership page and invitation page. If you want to search for previous discussions, you can use the "Search this group" button and the text field next to it. If the user happens to be the owner or manager of the group, there should also be links to group settings and management tasks.

About Page

From the About page you can find information that tells for example the number of members, how much activity it has, group description, web site address (if the group is used as a forum for a web site), categories (if categories have been defined for the group), access information (who can access the group contents, who can join, who can post, is the group moderated, etc.). From the about page you find the group email address to post messages to the discussions section of the group. There are also a link to contact the group owner and a link for a page for different kind of feeds for the group.

Group Members

A Google Groups discussion group has at least one member. That member is the owner of the group. In addition to that, a group may also have manager-members and only-members. Managers can't change the group settings as much as the owner can, but managers can for example remove messages sent to the group. Depending on the group settings, all members may be able post messages, create pages and upload files.

Group Settings

To be able to change all the settings of your group, you need to be signed in to Google Groups using the email address that is chosen to be the owner of the group. Then go to the main page of the group and click the "Group settings" link on the right hand side of the page. You should see seven tabs: "General", "Access", "Appearance", "Navigation", "Email delivery", "Categories", and "Advanced". From those tabs you can change various aspects of your group. Below are some examples how you can modify your group to suite your needs: * Change the name, email address, URL (web address), and description of your group ("General" tab). * Private group (use the "Only members can view group content" setting with the "People have to be invited" or "People can request an invitation to join" setting on the "Access" tab). * Announcement only group (change the "Who can post messages?" setting to "Managers only" on the "Access" tab and the "Replies to messages" setting to "Replies are sent to the author of the message" or "Replies are sent to the owners of the group" on the "Email delivery" tab). * Moderated group (change the "Message moderation" setting to "All messages are held for moderation" or select "No moderation - messages are delivered directly" setting and then the "Messages from new members are moderated" if you want to moderate the first few messages posted by new members). * Change the look of the group by choosing a ready made look or change individual elements of the group, such as the font, text styles and colors in different parts of the group (on the "Appearance" tab). * Decide which sections (discussions, pages, files, members list) of the group are shown on the main page of the group ("Navigation" tab).

Writing Messages

You can discuss using an email client program (e.g. Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird) if you are using the "Email" setting on the "Edit my membership" page for the group you are using. You can also discuss by using the Google Groups web interface of the group using a web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera). The current maximum size of a message (including attachments) seems to be 1 MB. File system and encoding issues lower the actual size limit. You can only use file attachments with email client programs and you need to use the file attachment function of your email client program (or service), so you probably can't simply copy and paste files to the message area of your email messages. If you are having trouble sending, seeing and receiving your messages, see the unofficial troubleshooting guide for some tips and hints.

Discussion Topic Page

There are some functions you can use on a discussion topic page. You can add a discussion to your Google Groups Favorites page by clicking the white star so that it changes to yellow (to access the Google Groups Favorites, click the "Favorites" link at the top of any Google Groups page when you are signed in). On a discussion page you can also select the "More options" link at the top of the page to see some hidden options. For example, you can select the "Show message list" link to see a "tree view" having a message list on the left side of the page (and you can also switch back to the initial "non-tree view"). You can switch to "Fixed text" if a message shows for example programming code or ASCII art. And if you want to get notified about new messages via email when someone posts a new message, select the "Email updates to me" link (works only with non-Usenet groups).

Message Information

You may also get more information and options for a message on a discussion. Click the "More options" link next to the point of time of the message. You should see the local time of the poster. You should be able to reply in group or reply to author (there is a 60 day time limit for replying in group so that the discussions don't get too long and useless, because the longer the discussion gets, the less probably anyone will read all the messages anyway). Other options should be "Forward", "Print", "Individual message", "Report this message", and "Find messages by this author". If you are the poster of the message or if you own or manage the group, you should be able to remove the message. If the group is not an official Google discussion group, you also should see the "Show original" link, which shows the message in its original format with message headers (for example "From:", "To:", "Subject:" and "Message-ID:"). Also, if the group is not an official Google discussion group, the email address of a poster should be shown. Because spammers use automatic bots to harvest email addresses from web pages, the email address has three dots in it. Click the three underlined dots and write the text asked on the so called Captcha page to unlock (unmunge/uncloack) the email address.

Pages

A group may have pages that can be edited by all group members or only by managers. Editable pages can be used for example in projects where many people need to edit the same text. There is no option to create other kind of documents such as spreadsheet documents, but you can edit spreadsheets online for example with Google Docs & Spreadsheets (which is not integrated with Google Groups (February 2007)).

Files

With Google Groups you can upload at least office documents (Word, OpenOffice.org, PDF, etc.), pictures (bmp, gif, jpg, etc.) and zip files (which may have directories and files inside them). The maximum size of an uploaded file seems to be 10 MB (file system and encoding issues decrease the actual limit). The quota (total file usage) should be shown at the bottom of the uploaded files page and it is 100 MB (February 2007). If you are having trouble uploading files or viewing them and if you have Internet Explorer, try adding the international Google domain (google.com), your local national domain (google.co.uk) and the googlegroups.com domain that is used with the uploaded files section of Google Groups to the Trusted Sites section in Internet Explorer (go to "Tools", "Internet Options", "Security").

Requirements

Google Groups seems to support some of the most used web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, but there can be different problems with different web browsers, so if you can't for example edit a page, try a different web browser.

Restrictions

Messages: The size limit for a single message seems to be 1 MB. There doesn't seem to be a restriction for how many messages your group can contain, but there are restrictions how many posts a user can post in a short period of time to somewhat protect the groups for example from automatic bots and automatic vacation messages, which could flood a group. Editable pages: The size limit for editable pages seems to be about 20 KB without getting error messages and about 700 KB, but with error messages. When you edit the HTML source of pages, you can't use all the HTML tags and elements such as <bgsound>, <embed>, <form>, <iframe>, <object> and <script>, because they will get removed, so you can't for example embed videos to pages. There was a similar kind of problem with Google Page Creator in its early stages, so maybe the editable pages in Google Groups might have an option to use those tags in the future, or maybe you need to start using for example Google Page Creator. Google doesn't usually tell about future plans, so probably only time will tell what you will be able to do in the future with the editable pages in Google Groups. Uploaded files: The size limit for a single uploaded file seems to be 10 MB and quota for all the uploaded files is 100 MB. When uploading a file, there might be a session time-out, which means that with a slow internet connection you might not be able to upload files that are close to the 10 MB limit. Also, keep in mind that even if your internet connection is fast enough there might be problems in one of the cables or servers between your system and Google.

What Google Groups Doesn't Have

A Google Groups discussion group doesn't have for example a calendar, a blog, chat function or a section for spreadsheets. Even though Google Groups isn't integrated with other Google services you could use Google Calendar for a calendar, Blogger for blogging, Google Talk or Gmail for chatting and Google Docs & Spreadsheets for spreadsheets. The editable pages seem to be meant for a basic way for many people to share information and co-work on the same subject (for example in work or school projects) and the uploaded files section only has a limited quota, so if your group members are interested in a more professional way of co-working with documents they could use Google Docs & Spreadsheets. And if your group members are interested in expressing themselves more thoroughly with megabytes worth of content (pictures, music, videos, pages, etc.), each of them could use their own Google Page Creator account for that purpose and tell about their own web site with links on their profiles and in discussions (you need to get a Gmail account to be able to sign up for a Google Page Creator account). If the group members only want to share their photos, they could use Picasa Web Albums for that purpose. That way they can use the same Google account for many different purposes without having the need to sign in to many services while using Google Groups.

Current version

At the time of writing this document (February 2007) Google Groups is now in its third version, so you can call it Google Groups 3.

History

In 1979 the Usenet was created. Because Usenet newsgroup messages existed only for a few weeks on many Usenet news servers, DejaNews started archiving Usenet newsgroup messages. Google acquired DejaNews in February 2001. The first version of Google Groups (GG1) was a Usenet newsgroup archive and you could also post Usenet newsgroup messages with it. Google Groups contained more than 845 million archived newsgroup messages in February 2004. Google Groups 2 (GG2) was published as Beta in May 2004. With Google Groups 2 you were able to create your own Google Groups discussion groups. Many Usenet fans liked the old and simple GG1 interface more, but by the end of July 2005 all the Google Groups 1 sites were replaced by GG2 sites. Google Groups 3 (GG3) was introduced as Beta in October 2006. It replaced most of the GG2 sites in January 2007. With Google Groups 3 you can create editable pages, upload files and change the outlook of your group.

Usenet

Because in 1970s many internet connections were slower than in 2000s, Usenet newsgroups were meant for text-only discussions (there are also binary newsgroups for files, such as pictures, music, videos, etc.), so text-only discussions were a fast enough way of discussing with people. Newsgroups are supposed to be used with Usenet newsreader client applications (e.g. Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird), but you can also read them with a web browser using a web-based Usenet newsreader (such as Google Groups). Here are some differences between Usenet newsgroups and Google Groups discussion groups: 1) You can read public and private Usenet newsgroups with a Usenet newsreader. With Google Groups you can mainly read public Usenet newsgroups (if archiving is allowed by that newsgroup). 2) Google Groups discussion groups are not meant to be read with a Usenet newsreader. 3) Public Usenet newsgroup messages are propagated to different Usenet news servers, which are owned by different organizations, but Google Groups discussion groups are only hosted by Google's own servers. 4) Usenet newsgroups don't have pages and uploaded files sections as Google Groups discussion groups may have.

Last modified: March 3rd, 2007

Author: Tomi Häsä (tomi.hasa@gmail.com)

URL: http://sites.google.com/site/tomihasa/google-groups-info