Buh-Bye… to Yahoo!  After almost nineteen years of discussions on OneList, which became eGroups, which became YahooGroups, a complete switch has been made to Groups.io.  While it looks very similar to Yahoogroups, Groups.io has a smoother, faster interface and is simpler to maintain for a club like SoAR.

One huge advantage is that subscriptions are no longer tied to Yahoo email accounts, eliminating an often confusing step in getting a new member subscribed.  Any email address will work with Groups.io which makes it much simpler for us to invite users into the system.  Also big is the idea of sub-groups, allowing our two-tiered member/non-member system to work more naturally.  We had SoARChat, which was open to anyone, but it was separate from SoARBusiness, which was for members-only.  Some members only subscribed to SoARChat, while others only subscribed to SoARBusiness, meaning that a message that had to go to everyone had to be sent twice, once on each group.   Now, anything sent to main@soarrocketry.groups.io (which replaces SoARChat) is seen by everyone in members@soarrocketry.groups.io  (which replaces SoARBusiness) as well.

So, anyone who wants to talk rockets with us can go to soarrocketry.groups.io and join, even if you aren’t a SoAR member.  If you then become a SoAR member, we’ll simply add you to the members group where we’ll handle topics that are for SoAR members only.

All the old messages, photos, and files from the YahooGroups are also in the soarrocketry.groups.io page (well, except for about 1000 messages that a previous SoAR Secretary accidentally erased!) and they have a better user interface to boot!