One of my hats is computer guy for the Advisory Council of the Consumer Law Section of the Texas State Bar. One of our projects for this year was to start an email discussion group for our members. About the time we started talking about this, Google started Google Groups. I experimented with it a little, using it for a small group and it seemed to work fine. It was easy for people to use and easy for me to administer, so I recommended it to the Council. They agreed and off I went. I set up an invitation only list for our members. Everything went fine and about 100 members opted into the group to participate in the discussion. So far, so good.
The Council president wanted to send an announcement to all of our members regarding our upcoming meeting in June. Google offers announcement groups as an option, so I set up a second group as an announcement only group for all of our members. Rather than setting up the group by invitation, I set it up so that members would be automatically added to the group without the need to respond. I can imagine the potential for abuse that such a tool creates, so I wasn’t concerned when during the setup process Google notified me that they were going to review the list before setting it up.
The next day I got the following email from Google via their “noreply@googlegroups.com” address:
Hello craig…@gmail.com,
We’re writing to let you know that we received your request to add 1169 new
members to the State Bar of Texas Consumer Law Section Announcements group.
We’ve changed the subscriptions to “invites,” which means the users in this
list will receive an email asking them if they want to join your group, and
won’t begin receiving messages from this group until they’ve joined.If you have questions about this or any other group, please visit the Google
Groups Help Center at http://groups-beta.google.com/support.Thanks, and we hope you’ll continue to enjoy Google Groups.
The Google Groups Team
Ouch! Why didn’t they just reject the request if they didn’t like the way I set it up? Why didn’t they ask me before changing the group from an opt-out announcement only group to an opt-in discussion group? Why did they choose to communicate with me via a no-reply email address? I certainly understand what beta means. It means that the software may not be entirely reliable, that features may change, or that the software may not work the way it is advertised. I don’t understand it to mean that human beings at Google are going to make arbitrary decisions about what functionality is going to be offered without any notice on the site or legal support from the terms of service.
Now I have almost 1169 section members who believe they are going to receive announcements from the section, but who aren’t, and no way to communicate with them because Google won’t let me. I’ve searched the Google Groups site for a way to contact them about this, but there doesn’t appear to be anything other than a general feedback form. I’ve sent it in, but have not received a response and don’t expect to. If someone who reads this has a contact at Google who might be able to help get this situation resolved, please drop me a line. For everyone else, take this as a half-rant, half-cautionary tale about Google Groups and the shaving off of another sliver of my own naivete.