New in Google Groups!

[Google Groups Team]

We’re happy to announce some of the latest design and feature improvements we have made to the new Google Groups. These changes are based on feedback we have received from you; we hope they will improve your discussion experience.

• Spam improvements: Starting next week, we will remove the option to “Add members directly” to googlegroups.com groups since spammers have unfortunately abused this feature. Group owners will still be able to invite you to join their groups and you will have to accept their invitation before you start participating in and receiving messages from the group. Learn more here: http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46373

• Support for more languages - The new Google Groups is now available in 40 languages. You can set your preferred interface language by visiting: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en and picking your preferred language using the drop down selector.

                        

• Topic starring - We heard that you’d like a better way to keep track of the discussions you care about most. Groups already allows you to follow your favorite topics by subscribing to email updates on individual topics. Now we’ve added the ability to star your favorite topics for easy viewing. Your starred topics can be viewed by clicking the Starred link on the left pane, similar to Google Docs. Learn more about this feature here: http://groups.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1304359

• Simplified discussion interface - Based on your feedback, we have taken steps to reduce clutter and simplify the new Groups. You told us that the topic list is hard to follow in very active groups, as newly-posted (and updated) topics appeared at the top of the list. Now, you will see a notification when topic updates are available and updated topics will be displayed only when you click on this notification.

                       

We have made other subtle improvements to the discussion experience. For example, when viewing a topic you will notice that the message actions are now wrapped into a drop-down menu on the top right corner of the message, much like they are in Gmail.

                       

This is only the beginning - we’re making even more design improvements to make Groups more focused, elastic & effortless. We are also building more community forum features into Groups. Our newest Google product forums, the Google+ discussion forum and Chromebook Central forum feature some of these improvements including:

• Topic categories that allow for better organization of discussions
• Questions & Answers that offer the ability to classify topics as discussions or questions, and to rate answers and mark a response as the best answer.
• Badges that give group participants a sense of identity within the group.

We’re also working to add the +1 button to public messages and topics in Google Groups, making it easy to recommend your favorite discussions to your friends. Stay tuned for these updates and more coming soon from Google Groups!

- Tom Stamm, Software Engineer, Google Groups