Here is a selection of remarks from there:
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"well congratulations smartgroups, 3 months on with these problems and no solution looks forthcoming. I see the date of the annoncement on the homepage has now been deleted therefore they neednt change the date leaving the info the same, "we are aware of delays", well done smartgroups thats not too difficult is it."
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"this has now being going on for months, and no real sign on inprovement,
I can see why some groups are moving away !!."
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"Some of our members have begun noting what time they are sending out their messages. It makes checking the delivery time much easier. Messages are now taking approximately 60 hours (2 1/2 days) to be delivered."
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Although my groups have now moved to Google I'm still a member of this group to monitor when the situation recovers - if it ever does.
I did try talking t Wanadoo, has anyone else and have they had any success?
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I've already recreated my group on Yahoo in preparation of moving there,
there is no incentive to stay any longer. SG used to be the best free group
hosting place imo but now it's become a joke.
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The vascular list left smartgroups last week and went to Yahoo. We are so happy with yahoo. our emails go right through and it is great not having all this crap like we have here. Hope everyone tries yahoo , they are not bad. I see the home page of smartgroups today posts yet another problem with slow emails , hours of delays. They lost the battle and the war we are gone.
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I am involved with a smartgroup for our local highschool parent organization. We have had significant issues with SmartGroups lately and have decided to move-on. We are using a service called http://ugroo.com/ that provides a website that we can manage ourselves, as well as a mailing list. This of course does not come for free, but I beleive it will be worth it.
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I WANT to stay on SmartGroups, but I just can't anymore after the multitude of bugs and lately the mail problems.
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I have 10 groups on SG and none of them are functioning normally yet.
I have pretty much given up and gone to Google Groups and am leaving
SGs with the files etc. We still do not have a reason WHY this
happened for the last month or more from SGs!
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...
(Yul Brynner as the King of Siam in "The king and I")
Joined: 07 Jun 2006Posts: 1Location: Ontario, Canada
I received a link to this site from another disgruntled smartgroups user. The problems with Smartgroups started in December, when messages began taking a few hours to be delivered through their mailing list feature. It is now 6 months later, and messages are taking 17+ days to be delivered.
What is even worse is Wanadoo/Orange's complete disregard for the problem. From the beginning, I believe that no one has received a reply from their 'technical support' as to what the problem is or when it will be fixed. There is a message on the smartgroups homepage (www.smartgroups.com) that says they are aware of the problem and are working on it. They used to update the date that the message was posted every day, but stopped even doing that about a month ago. When you email their technical support, you receive a form mail back that contains exactly the same message as is on the home page.
Also interesting to note is that the advertising that used to be on Smartgroups has all been removed, so they are not generating money with it anymore. Those participating in the managers forum believe that Smartgroups has been 'let out to pasture' and they are just waiting for the system to completely melt down and force everyone to go somewhere else.
It would have been so much better for them to send a nice email to all of the managers that said they were cancelling the service in 60 days (or whatever) thank you very much, instead of this delay tactic they are currently using.
Is anyone at Wannado or Smartgroups listening????? I have 6 groups on Smartgroups. Emails take anywhere from 1 week to 6 weeks if ever to appear in mailboxes. Some just disappear all together. Why don't they just tell us the straight goods? They don't want us. No one is doing anything about these problems. Surely we are owed an explanation after all these months.
ellacurly (owner moderator 6 groups on Smartgroups)
Joined: 08 Apr 2006Posts: 10Location: Stoke on Trent
ellacurly wrote:
Is anyone at Wannado or Smartgroups listening?????
Evidently not.
Things did improve briefly (towards the end of June, I think), that only lasted a month. The service is now back to what it was before Orange "fixed" it (p**s-poor). It's funny really, on the Smartgroups home page at www.smartgroups.com is a "Service Update" which is several weeks old. It runs as follows:
"Service Update
Dear Members,
We are sorry for the problems users were experiencing when using Smartgroups, these were due to high volumes of spam mail coming into Smartgroups which prevented legitimate mail from being handled satisfactorily. Since we added new measures to control the mail there has been a consistent improvement in service resulting in mail being delivered more promptly.
We will continue to monitor Smartgroups for any further problems and hope to sustain this level of service in the future.
Thank you for your patience.
The Admin Team"
I think that the contextual error "[we] hope to sustain this level of service in the future" was prophetic, they have sustained the pathetic level of service. Unfortunately, people's patience is overstretched.
I decided that I am not going to place my lists at the mercy of any "free" service, and am in the process of setting up a mail list with a few bells and whistles on my own server (with a great deal of help from someone). I expect it to go live during September.
In the interim, I have purged my main list of 1,600 false or obsolete registrations (leaving 250 "real" members) in preparation.
Orange clearly don't give a toss about their subscribers, presumably Smartgroups is a commercial failure which was just taken on as a part of the Wannadoo package, and Orange couldn't care less if the user base find alternative services.
Just in case you haven't found it already, there is a managers support group set up on Yahoo (because Smartgroups is so unreliable!). The URL is:
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