Bulk Operations

From PluginWiki

The plugin can automate some operations which you might want to do on lots of your members.

Bulk Member Operations

To use these, pick them from the drop-down list on the Members page:

A few general points about these operations:

They have to run very slowly, otherwise Yahoo blocks you. There's little that can be done to speed them up - you just have to be patient and start them going when you can leave your computer on.
While they're running, you can moderate as normal in a separate tab, though be gentle - if you do too much, then Yahoo may block you with 999 errors.
The very first time you run some of them there may be a lot of users to change - so it can take a long time (potentially hours) if you have a large group.
There's a lag in Yahoo updating the information that the plugin uses to decide which members need action, so if you run it several times immediately after each other you'll probably see the same users each time. This should stop if you wait for a day or two.
- However there have been a few cases of users who seem to get 'stuck', and show up each time in this list even though when you look at them in detail they shouldn't.
- You can manually change their state yourself (e.g. to No Email and back again), which appears to wake Yahoo up. Or you can remove them and get them to rejoin.

When some of these run, they will ask you if you want to ignore any Yahoo IDs. You can also change the interval (increase it if you're seeing 999 errors).

Bouncing Member Maintenance

Yahoo can be slow at removing Bouncing Members. For some groups this is fine - they just sit there on the membership list, and there's no real problem. But some groups like to tidy them up, so they get a more accurate membership count.

You'll see this popup rather than the usual one:

The way this works is as follows:

It finds all the bouncing members (using an Export).
It looks up the bouncing history for each member.
If the member has been bouncing longer than the minimum number of days, and less than the maximum, and has had at least the minimum number of reactivation requests sent, then they will be removed. (The point of the maximum number is that sometimes there are members who Yahoo claims have been bouncing for so long that it's implausible and probably a Yahoo bug)
Otherwise it will send a reactivation for them, and tell you how many reactivations have been sent so far.

Membership Cross-Check

What is it?

Occasionally group owners and/or moderators want to see if they have members who are also members of another group many miles away - the theory being that such a member may be a spammer or harvesting email addresses. A typical example would be that the Scarborough group would not expect to have anyone who is also a member of the Edinburgh group.

Alternatively, you might have two related groups and want to see who's a member of one but not the other. An example would be a Cafe group - you might want to check whether everyone on the Cafe group is a member of the main group.

How do you run it?

So how do you do a manual Membership Cross-Check?

1. If it's not a group you're a moderator on, then contact the group owner for the group you would like to check against and ask if they are happy for you to join their group so you can do the check. If they are, you will need them to give you moderator status.

2. Go to your Members page and select Membership Cross-Check from the Bulk Operations drop-down list:

3. In the box which comes up, put the URLs of any groups you want to check against.

You can check against multiple other groups or just one.
It's safest to cut and paste the url's to avoid typos.
Separate them with a semicolon and be sure not to have any trailing slashes.

4. Then select whether you want to show members who are in both or all groups, or members who are in one but not others.

In the example below, it's checking against the Edinburgh.

5. Click OK and leave the plugin to do the checking. On large groups, this can take some considerable time.

Related Function

If you want to run this check automatically at regular intervals, you need to go to the Membership Crosscheck page and follow the instructions there.

The Membership Cross-Check function is different from the function which uses a Spammer List - though you can use this function to identify people who should go on that list.

Web Only to Special Notices

Your group may have it as a requirement that the "No Email" setting is not allowed and all members must, as a minimum, be set to "Special Notices". One reason for doing this is that it ensures members have a valid email address, and can therefore receive replies to their posts - if they don't have a valid address, then Special Notices mails will cause them to get flagged as bouncing.

Obviously if you want to send out an ADMIN notice to all your members, those on the "No Email" setting won't receive it. Before you send out your Special Notice, run this feature and it will automatically change No Email members to Special Notices members.

If you use this, you might like to:

put something in the Ts&Cs sent when people join the group
send an ADMIN out first

...so that people don't complain.

You can also send an email when this happens.

Set all to Daily Digest

This changes all members to receive mail via Daily Digest. This is a very unusual operation to do, so only do it if you know your group needs it for some reason.

Moderate All

You should only use this on groups where the moderation status is all messed up. It will change all members apart from moderators to be on moderated status.

Warning! You will not be able to return previously unmoderated members back except individually. If you need to moderate all your members because of a flame war you can do this under yahoo management and don't need the plug in to do this. You can use the Management Settings and change the group settings to moderate all from moderate new members.

Unmoderated to Group

Some groups or moderators set members to unmoderated by mistake, rather than the group setting. The group setting is better because it allows you to take the whole group on or off moderation if you need to (e.g. because a flame war breaks out).

This operation will convert unmoderated members to the group setting.

This has to run quite slowly, to prevent Yahoo blocking you, and the very first time you run it there may be a lot of users to change - so it can take a long time (potentially hours) if you have a large group.

Moderate Idle Members

Some groups find that members who have been idle for a long time tend to forget the posting rules. We probably all do that on groups we don't use much. So you might want to change members who have been idle for a while to be back on moderated status, so that you can check their posts if they ever wake up.

Remember that some people object to being put on moderation - so you might want to make sure that you've reserved the right to do this in the joining mail you send out.

For the purposes of this function, a member is not idle if:

They've posted a message, or
They've tried to do so but were blocked because they're set to Can't Post.

Spot Duplicate Members

This checks to see if there are users with different Yahoo IDs, but with the same email address, or the same Yahoo ID with different email addresses; some groups find that people do this to get around limits on the number of WANTED mails.

After a brief diversion via another screen, it'll say Looking for duplicate members. For any duplicates it finds, it will say something of the form Duplicate email@domain as YahooID1 and YahooID2. Once it's done it'll say Finished.

Mail Pending Members

Sometimes you might want to send a mail to pending members, for example to remind them to reply to a message which they were sent when they replied. But you don't want to send it to the same member too often. This feature gives you that.

See Mail Pending Members.

Long-standing to Group

Some groups like to take members who've been on the group for a while off moderation and onto group settings (this is almost the opposite of moderating idle members; people do things differently). This bulk operation asks you for a number of days, and then puts members who've been in the group for longer than that onto group settings, unless:

they have an entry in the database - which might mean you've got them moderated for a reasons, or
they're moderators/owners.

You can configure a message to be sent when this happens - see here.

TAKEN/RECEIVED follow-up

This allows you to send messages to members who've posted a TAKEN or RECEIVED message. The idea here is that you might want to thank them for doing so, or ask them to publicise your group.

You'll be asked for any members to ignore, and the minimum number of TAKEN or RECEIVED messages which they must have sent before we mail them.

This will send no more than one message to such members within 30 days. These messages will not count towards mod mail counts (because we tend to use those to see if members can be taken off moderation, so if someone has been sent one of these mails you wouldn't want to keep them on moderation just for that) but will show up in the list you get if you move your mouse over the mod mails count.

You must have an access key for your group in order to use this.

Bulk Message Operations

These operations also run very slowly, to avoid Yahoo blocking you.

Posting Stats

This is a basic way of getting some information about the messages on your group (or any group you're a member of - you don't need to be a moderator).

You run it from the Messages page:

You might briefly see a message that looks like an error, and then the plugin will ask you how far back you want to scan.

You'll then see the plugin slowly trawl back in time collecting the Posting Stats.

The % of posts which were moderated.
The most active moderators.
The % of users who were moderated.
The % of posts which came from Yahoo.
The % of posts which came from My Freecycle.
The % of posts which came from the Firefox Member Plugin.
The % of posts which came from the IE Member Plugin.
The % of posts which came from email.

You can click on the subject to open the relevant message.

This has to work very slowly, so you're not blocked by Yahoo, so don't panic if it doesn't do anything for a few minutes.

Message Delete

Many groups don't delete messages, because they're a useful source of information:

Showing the full posting history for members, which is useful to check if you're considering them for a moderator role.
Giving information on the locations people pick, in case you later need to split a group.
Showing the amount you keep out of landfill to prove to your local council that they should support you.

So don't use this function lightly.

The plugin adds a new link to the page you get when you search for messages:

If you click on this, you'll get a couple of confirmation dialogues to confirm, and then it will delete all the messages that match this search:

Not just the ones on this page - all of them. So that means you need to be really confident that your search isn't going to pick up any messages you wouldn't want to delete.
And you can't get them back later if you change your mind.

If you go ahead, then:

You'll see each message get marked as Deleting... followed by Deleted.
If you see it say Delete Failed! that's because of a Yahoo problem. Sometimes Yahoo doesn't let you delete some messages (if you tried manually you'd get an error saying your group is temporarily unavailable).
Then it'll pause for 30s, so as not to freak out Yahoo.
Then it'll look for the next page.

Once it's finished, it'll tell you:

This function uses Yahoo's unreliable search, which means it may miss some messages.

Message Download

This is a quick and dirty way to download messages, including their source, between a certain range. It's not very slick.