Tips for Accessing Your sounderWorld Group on Yahoo

Many of you have encountered problems establishing membership in Yahoogroups and accessing our group's home page on Yahoo.com. Accessing the group's home page is not required, since all you really need is to receive messages from the group via email, which you are almost certainly doing already. However, some of you would like to enjoy the advantages of full membership in the group. This document is designed to help.

There are four steps you need to take.

Step 1. Go to http://yahoo.com and find the link that says, "New here? Sign Up." Click that link and follow the prompts to create a Yahoo ID and password. If you are already a Yahoo member, you should skip this step.

Step 2. Next, you need to "Verify" the email address that you used to enroll in Yahoo. Here's how:

First, go to the Yahoo Groups home page at:

http://groups.yahoo.com

...and log in with the Yahoo ID password you created in Step 1.

Step 3. Then, in the yellow panel on the upper left hand corner of the Yahoo Groups page, you'll see all the Yahoo groups that you're enrolled in. Unless you already belong to other groups, that panel will be empty. In that empty panel, lower down, you'll see a tiny purple link that says, "Don't see all your groups?"

Click that link, and it will take you to the "Find My Groups" page. Read the text there, and you'll see that you can "verify" an email address or add a new one if necessary. Follow the instructions to verify the email address you used when you enrolled in Yahoo.

Step 4. Finally, you need to "claim" your group. To do that, return to the "Find My Groups" page and click the blue "continue" button.

Then you will see a list of any groups you haven't "claimed" yet, and you can claim them, and complete your membership in those groups. That list should contain your sounderWorld group (with its numeric suffix, 1, 2, 3, etc.), which is the one you want.

Once you have completed these steps, you should be able to log-in to your sounderWorld group's home page any time, and view the message archive there. You can also change the settings for you account if desired.

Please note: I know this process seems incredibly obscure, and I apologize for that. The software behind this Yahoo site must be very primitive; it certainly is not user-friendly! As a result, the average user blames herself and her "poor computer skills" for the difficulty. In fact, it is all a result of Yahoo's badly designed and implemented software!

Even so, let's all do our best, and take advantage of services Yahoo does provide, which are mostly good, and free. I am exploring other avenues for future groups.