IBET is Moving

The long running online forum, IBET or Illinois Birders Exchanging Thoughts, is moving from it’s current platform on Yahoo Groups to a Google platform. If you are a current subscriber, be sure to visit and sign up on the new platform. If you aren’t, now might be a great time to check it out and consider joining the list. Below is an open letter from the moderators explaining the hows, why’s and when’s of the the upcoming move.

Hello IBET Community,

As I think everyone is aware of at this point, Yahoo groups is going away and everything will be deleted from the servers on December 14th. This was pretty short notice, so we quickly started looking at other available services and have decided on Google groups as the new community platform. It’s free, email-based, and should be as easy to use as Yahoo was (especially for the moderators). Trust us we did look at many different services that are used by other communities and Google groups was the easiest to setup and use...and it was free. Feel free to complain to us directly so that this message doesn’t get buried in commentary.

We are going to shutdown the Yahoo group on December 1st so that we have time to finish archiving messages.

The easiest way for us to get everyone moved over to the new IBET group is for everyone to add themselves to the new group as soon as possible and start using that group instead of the Yahoo group.

The easiest way to subscribe is to send an email to ilbirds+subscribe@googlegroups.com (ilbirds+subscribe at googlegroups.com) from the email account you want to subscribe and then simply reply to the “Join request” email. (it’s simpler to reply to the second email instead of actually clicking “join”)

Here is the email address to send your posts to once you are subscribed: ilbirds@googlegroups.com

Here is the new web address for the group to view messages: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ilbirds

FAQs

Q: Do I have to have a google account to join?
A: No, you can join by sending an email from the email account you want to subscribe, send your request to ilbirds+subscribe@googlegroups.com . Once approved you will get the posts sent directly to your email account. However, without an account you will have to ask the managers to change your subscription for you since that can only be done by logging into Google groups with a google account.

Q: How do I send posts to the group without going to the web-based version?
A: Send posts via email to ilbirds@googlegroups.com 

Q: What is the easiest way for me to manage my subscription?
A: The easiest is to sign up for a Google account and then use the web-based Google Group to change settings and subscription preferences. Moderators can change subscriptions too, upon request.

Q: But Yahoo groups isn’t going away entirely so why change?
A: Good question. 1. For the last couple years, there have been many glitches in posting and because Yahoo is winding down their groups they don’t have any tech support to help with those issues. 2. Yahoo is going to be limiting even more how the moderators can manage groups via the web, and Google Groups still offers an easy way for the group managers to change things through the web based group.

Please send questions directly to the moderators and we will update the group if there are specific issues that we feel need to be broadcast to the group at large.

Thank you everyone!

Matt Igleski
Adam Sell
Jeff Bilsky