Welcome to Grouply Owner Controls. You may have arrived at this page because you have heard some rumors about Grouply, and you were told you could come here to block your groups from Grouply. You may have arrived here as a group owner who is ok with group members using Grouply, but you wanted to take advantage of our new features to control how your group is accessed through Grouply. However you arrived, we’re glad you’re here.

Grouply Facts

In our experience, group owners are typically open-minded and fair. They want to go beyond the rumors to understand the facts so they can make informed decisions for their groups. If you still want to block your group after reading the facts, then we are happy to help you. Here are the facts about Grouply:

1. Thousands of people are safely enjoying Grouply today. With Grouply we are trying to address some of the longtime issues that group members and owners have suffered through with their online groups, email lists and discussion boards. Group members who belong to many groups or extremely active groups complain of “information overload”, and Grouply helps them keep up in less time. Group owners complain of the “maintenance nightmare” associated with administering their groups. Grouply is here to help, and we want you to love Grouply! You can read more about what Grouply is and how it works here.
2. Grouply is not a spammer. People are referring to the invites that enthusiastic Grouply users are sending to their groups. Grouply provides a template they can use, but most people do not change the text so it looks the same to all groups. People were not carefully selecting which groups to invite, and so some groups were getting multiple invites. Group members interpreted this as spam being sent by Grouply directly. Even though Grouply has been out since September 2007, this all started over the weekend of February 3, and we still do not know why. You can read the full story here. To address this issue, we quickly updated Grouply so that users cannot send an invite to a group that has already been told about Grouply recently.
3. Grouply is not a phisher or an identity thief. We carefully protect your Yahoo password and use it only to discover your group list and retrieve your group messages. We do not use it to access your Yahoo Mail or anything else. Click here for more on how Grouply protects Yahoo passwords. There has been a lot of speculation about Grouply on various Yahoo Groups and blogs. Here is an example of one negative posting along with our response to it. As you can see, much of what is written is pure speculation by people who have never tried Grouply.
4. Grouply does not publish your group messages to a wider audience. Grouply is basically a “smart” email reader, specially designed for reading messages from online groups. Instead of forwarding group messages to your Gmail or Yahoo Mail account, group members send their messages to Grouply and read them there. Like any email application, Grouply maintains the privacy of your messages – members can’t read a group’s messages on Grouply unless they belong to the group.
5. Grouply maintains group member privacy. Grouply users have the option to share information about themselves in Grouply, but they are in complete control over who sees what. Grouply does not collect or expose any information about group members who are not Grouply users.
6. One group member using Grouply does not put your whole group at risk. If your group has a single member using Grouply, then all that means is that one person is reading their group messages on the Grouply website instead of in their email application. Grouply does not collect any additional information about your group when one member joins Grouply.
7. Grouply does not claim copyright ownership to your messages on Grouply. The person who created the message holds the copyright to it. As stated in our Terms of Service, Grouply’s copyright is limited to the components of the website itself (e.g., logos and labels) and the communications services provided the Grouply.

So what does all this mean for me as a group owner?

Today your group members use many different email services (e.g., Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, inbox.com) to read their group messages. Grouply is comparable to these services and is another way for group members to access your group messages. With this in mind, you may not be concerned about Grouply, and you don’t need to do anything. You can simply allow your group members to use the email reader of their choice. All of these systems protect the privacy and confidentiality of your group messages and members. There is no additional risk with Grouply.

In fact, you might want to try Grouply yourself. As an owner, you will save time in administering your groups, and you learn more about your groups through the useful statistics and summaries that Grouply provides. And because Grouply users are typically more satisfied and engaged than non-users, there’s a good chance your group will be more successful overall with Grouply! Click here to read more about the benefits that Grouply offers group owners.

The easiest way to get a feel for Grouply is to register yourself. You don’t need to access all your groups through Grouply; you can start with just one or a few. If you aren’t satisfied, you can disconnect one or more of your groups or delete your account at any time. Another option for trying Grouply is to use one of our test accounts or create your own test account.

If you have additional questions or concerns, please check out our FAQ, take a tour, view some tutorials, or contact us at support@grouply.com .

Using Grouply Owner Controls

Thanks for reading this far and taking the time to learn more about Grouply. If you decide to block your group from Grouply, we respect that decision, and we will help you to do this. Here’s what you can do with Grouply Owner Controls:

1. Enable access - Allow your group members to access your group through Grouply if they choose to do so. You can also set whether Grouply users in your group can invite others to try Grouply using the “Invite My Group” feature.
2. Disable access - Prevent your group members from accessing your group through Grouply.

Whatever you decide to do now, please be aware that you can return to Grouply Owner Controls at any time to verify your settings or make changes. If you disable access today, you can return later and re-enable access.

Thanks for your interest in Grouply Owner Controls.