As a moderator of Moms on the Hill since the early aughts, I have been fielding snark about Yahoo Groups for quite a while. It’s mostly well-deserved snark, I would say. Yahoo has inexplicably made their product worse for many years, stripping it of any usable functionality. I was even part of a story about how terrible it is for NPR a few years ago.
But change is hard. And the moderators have jobs, families, lives, blogs, and then Netflix happened so where does the time go?? Also the thought of somehow moving 8000 people just made me tired. So we dawdled.
But then fate forced our hand and we recently learned that Yahoo is pulling the plug on Groups. And so, like so many other neighborhood listservs across the land, we had to decide. Luckily, a MOTH home on maternity leave jumped in with a solution and the offer to make it happen. Soon, MOTH will have a home on groups.io. Members will have the ability to actually search again! The platform allows for hashtags to organize threads. We have been told that all the archives from 2001 will be pulled along with it, which is a blessing because those bitter spats about circumcision and crying-it-out from the early days are internet gold and should be preserved for future generations.
So fingers crossed. The platform switch has not happened yet, so we are waiting…
If you are a parent or parent-to-be living (expecting or in the final stages of adoption) on “the Hill” (or the space between North and South Capitol Streets; Florida Ave to Benning Road and the Anacostia river),
you can join the new group by sending the moderators an email with that info to main+owner@MoTH.groups.io but maybe wait a week or two while we get settled…