This has certainly been an eventful few days for us here at Grouply. The good news is that we experienced a huge surge in our user base. The bad news is that some of our new users got upset quickly and left. How did this happen?

First some background. Like all social sites, Grouply offers templates to assist users with inviting their friends to join. Grouply, as you would expect, offers an “Invite My Group” feature that allows a user to post a message to one or more of her groups about Grouply. It’s really little more than a box with some editable default text, plus some check boxes to indicate which groups you want to send to. Pretty simple. Too simple, as it turns out.

For some reason, on Super Bowl Sunday when they should have been watching football, a number of Grouply users decided it was a good time to start inviting all their groups to Grouply. And then the new Grouply users invited all their groups, including the original groups. And so on. You see where this is going? Some groups wound up getting “hit” over and over with the same invitation, and the next thing we know, Grouply was labeled a spammer. We want you to love Grouply, and now people think we’re a spammer. Nobody loves a spammer. Nobody.

We screwed up, and we suffered for it. Bigtime. Grouply has been knocked down and dragged around on message boards and our own beloved Yahoo Groups all over the place – from knitting groups in Canada, to school groups in Australia, to graphics groups in Germany, and adult groups the world over. And it hurt. The virality of the internet giveth and it taketh away.

In between taking hits, we also managed to fix a few things. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

1. Restricted “Invite My Group”
If a group has already been invited to Grouply, why invite them again? Why, indeed. Well now you can’t. As of Monday, we disabled the Invite My Group feature for any group that was invited to Grouply in the previous 30 days. So you should no longer be seeing multiple Grouply invites in a group. If you do, then it’s a bug, and you should let us know about it at support@grouply.com .

2. Self-Service Delete
After seeing all the Grouply invitations, a number of users were understandably concerned about this “Grouply thing” and wanted out. Although they could “disconnect” their Groups from within Grouply, they wanted their accounts to be wiped from our system with all data erased. And unfortunately Grouply didn’t yet have this capability. So the process was for them to email us, and for us to delete them one by one. Needless to say, we spent several very late nights handling the requests, and our users had to wait far too long for confirmation that everything was taken care of. I am happy to report that we have added a feature where you can delete your account yourself, right from within Grouply. You can get immediate results … and we can get some sleep.

3. List Owner Controls
Some group owners, seeing all the Grouply invites flying around, felt as though their group had been “hijacked”. This soured them on the whole Grouply idea, and now, unfortunately, Grouply has been banned from a few groups. Again, not a great situation to be in for a company whose goal is to be loved. “Banned” doesn’t equal “loved” in any language I’m aware of.

We are now working with some list owners to develop the first of what we hope to be many owner controls for Grouply. Group owners will be able to decide if they want their group to be accessible in Grouply at all. They will also be able to disable the Invite My Group button for their group if that’s not the sort of thing their group allows. We expect to introduce these owner control features into Grouply in the next few days.

So that’s where we are. We blew it on Super Bowl Sunday, got to work fixing things by the fourth quarter, and now four days later we are on the road to recovery (knock on wood). Not bad for an internet company, right? And we’ll keep listening – because we’re not done yet. So please continue to send your comments and suggestions to feedback@grouply.com or to me directly at mark@grouply.com .

For those of you who stuck with us, we thank you for your patience and understanding. For those who left, there are no hard feelings whatsoever on our end, and we hope to see you back again on Grouply whenever you’re comfortable with returning. If you have any questions about Grouply or our security or privacy policies, please check out our FAQ page.

So long for now.

Mark
Co-founder/CEO, Grouply

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UPDATE: Several owners and moderators from ListHelp, EmailList-Managers (ELM), and Yahoo Group of Groups (YGOG), and GroupManagersForum (GMF) have created a new group called GrouplyImprovements where Grouply management is working with group owners to resolve outstanding issues and develop new Grouply features.  We are posting regularly to GrouplyImprovements with progress updates.  You can join GrouplyImprovements here.