I like the clean look and the non-intrusive ads. I needed something extremely user friendly for those in the group that are not up-to-speed on using group sites. It’s working well so far. I hope it stays around.

I looked at many, many group sites before settling in.

The problem with my migration is instead of continuing where it left off it started from the beginning … THREE times.

I now have three copies of my GENERAL board (largest board) and Multiply cannot migrate the remaining 21 smaller boards because the group is now at capacity.

I have been fighting to get the remaining boards migrated and now they are saying Sunday 1st March is the final day of migrations.

Unfortunately I used MSN Groups to back up seven years worth of studies and didn’t migrate anywhere else since I thought I would have no problems migrating to Multiply.

Why did you wait untiul there was less than a week left to migrate your groups to ask all these questions when it has been 4 months that we’ve known about MSN closing groups? It is too late to request migration to Yuku. You’d better hurry if you want to try migrating to Multiply and Aimoo as MSN groups close on Saturday. You’d better request the migrations today, and yes, you may migrate to both.

Thanks for the message, I’ll look into Yuku.

Can I ask what you meant when you said bigtent are spammers? I did get a message from Bigtent (on MSN) telling me about bigtent, which I found helpful. Technically that one email was unsolicated, but still very helpful at the time.

I made a group on bigtent to see what it was like. I have not recieved anything since that I would call spam?

There group system seems too advanced meanly to get a few emails to send spam out to … can you tell me more?

One more thing, can I migrate my group to many sites to see which is best.

Also, it is very important to me that the subject-matter is not made public (i.e. to web-crawling) do you know which sites meet this requirement?

thanks

QG

Although Yuku can not migrate custom pages and photo albums, they do provide easy instructions to save those to your computer. They are the only servcie fully migrating message boards onto usable forums with all the message baords you had on MSN, all the messages intact, including the graphics. they have migrated 2 of my groups very well, a third is nealry done, and the 4th will be done soon.

Bigtent is run by Spammers. They have Spammed countless MSN groups, and hardly anyone from MSN has moved their groups there. Most have moved to Yuku, Multiply, Aimoo, Proboards, Shutterfly, World Groups, Google and a few others.

BigTent looks very good, lots of admin options like customisable application forms (I’ve always wanted to asked members a few simple questions to help me approve their membership) and custom terms/rules which members must agree to before joining (i.e. “I promise to be good and not to post inappropriate material” etc) and even a fee charging subscription service (useful for some groups I suppose for collecting dibs). Even with all these customisable options it is surprisingly easy to use and seems stable.

Downside ~ so far Bigtent can’t import old messages from MSN (which Multiply can). Also the photo sharing is quite limited (only upload one pic at a time!). I would like to see emoticons option in the message boards too (they are there but only if you know the shortcut i.e. “:-)” results in a smiley face). Also like Multiply the messages seems to have quite a lot of decorative white space, I’d like to see the messages in a more compact layout which suits long message threads.

lefora.com (another forum) says that they can import MSN group message boards and members. A quick look shows that lefora seems to have a better forum page than Multiply, but I could not see a photo album page. Also lefora seems to harbour a lot of advertisement space (lots of blinking areas enticing me to download this and that) which I didn’t like much!!! If Bigtent has advertising on it somewhere, it must be very discrete, as I can’t recall seeing any!

For me BigTent is the winning ticket, but why-o-why can’t they solve the problem of importing the MSN message boards and preferably the member list directly from MSN! They have an option to allow you to invite members from a list (which you will need to make yourself in the form of a spread sheet etc) but not directly from MSN!! BigTent I urge you to solve this before the February switch over, then you would win hands down!!!!!

The final problem with all these new groups (i.e. multiply, Bigtent, lefora) is that none of them seem to offer a customisable “list” option that was present in MSN. I used to use lists to organise meetings, i.e. who is coming, when, and have they paid up etc!

My quandary is this, my MSN group has over 500 members, 4000 messages and 100’s of photos and 10s of “list” pages … thus do I go with the less good (IMO) Multiply and preserve the message and photo archive, or do I start a new group on Bigtent and lose the message and photo archive? Do I use both ~ multiply as a back up and Bigtent going forward? I’m not happy with any of these choices!!!

Huff!

QG

xxx

happy new year
xxxx

I’ve never heard of MoveMSNGroups.com.

It’s really a shame for Microsoft to drop the ball like this and leave thousands of people out in the cold. I wonder if it really will shutdown come Feb 21st, or if they’ll extend it.

Has migration bots – you need to make your forum “open” so they can run. I haven’t tried it yet and I haven’t checked out all the alternatives here, but this one is the only one that offers to let you keep your forum history. I help run a football forum and our posting history is important to us.

Multiply – at last report, only migrates 7 pages of your old msn forum. Not good enough really. And it doesn’t have a proper forum that allows people to follow a conversation or quickly spot which is the current or active conversation. You can get all blog posts to your “inbox” but I cannot find any tools to sort out the resulting chaos from the very active support forum. There’s no threading or grouping by conversation. Sucks. If I want a social network – I’d use facebook or something else.

Oh and most deadly sin – multiply crawls. Unless you’re a uni student with an ultra fast connection – forget it. Oh and twenty million clicks to get to bit you want, where as I used to do it with one click.

It’s a platform that lets you create your own free group website. While they don’t have a migration tool, it’s very easy to create a group site and invite your existing group members.

You can try it out here:

http://www.blas...e_group_website

http://www.forumarena.com/

Simply brilliant platform in which to disccuss a single topic, “The recent anouncement to close MSN groups”.

BUT….. very black and white, If I want black and white, I’ll read a good book.

I’ve been with MSN myself since 2002, first as a chatter then a chat room host in MSN Chats, then as a Group moderator and then a Group owner, with MSN groups. I’m now an owner of several groups that cover a variety of topics. Through ownership I discovered a creative flair and used that to create interesting pages and topic threads. With the click of a mouse you could easily acess and comment on any board or begin a thread of your own.

I also grew socialy from a lost single soul to being married. I also attributed this to MSN.

I met and married another chat host in 2003 at a double wedding of 4 chatters from 3 different states of Australia, both couples will notch up 6 happy years next April. We even married at a historic water pumping station that provided town water to the local town aptly named Walka Water Works [WWW] for short.

I taught myself HTML & now maintain a website. I owe it all to MSN chats & groups. We used MSN groups as an interactive platform to promote our personal website.

I will really miss the social network I had with friends & those I’ve met personaly and kept in touch with through these various groups. Not all my contacts want to join get another network. They are already complaining about having too many accounts with various networks: Live Spaces, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and a multitude of other networks each with it’s own purpose.

The only thing I can see MSN has really achieved after all these years is spread us all out…. I thought communities were about bringing people together?

I refer back to when “Chats” closed it was as if a bomb had hit, people who visited more than one chat room had to join various chat servers to stay in touch with the various chat groups they belonged to. Yet others lost contact because of computer crashes with all the new software that was need to chat in the various servers, if they were not in your IM they became lost souls, I’m hope & pray that some of those lost souls found new friends. It’s not easy to find old friends back when their personal ID’s & nick names changed with each network, because your usual name was already taken….

What will happen with our MSN groups now…. They will be spread further afield

Great Community Spirt Microsoft !!!

There have been some great comments above, I’ve clicked a few group suggestion links and I’m still looking for that one that will be closest to what we are leaving behind… It’s wonderful to have a place to air our opinions… If only someone would hear them.

Opinions on migration

I migrated one of my smaller groups (3 pages and a couple of boards and a 6 album gallery) to Multiply to test out the process. The transistion went smoothly, took about 15 minutes, but when I logged into Multiply, I had to create an new a personal account before logging into my group. An email was sent out to all the members to say the group had moved and to apply for membership… I hadn’t even sorted my mess out and there were members knocking on the door to get in.

The entire msn group message threads were dumped in a blog thread, I switched to edit mode and was able to capture HTML coding from some of the posts to edit my Multiply welcome board but anything that was linked to other boards became a broken link and had to be scraped.

As all the messages from various boards were all in one complete blog thread… and not being familiar enough with Multiplys editing process to know how to move things. My group at multiply is a bit of a mess. Keep in mind it is only a small group…. I wonder how bigger groups will fair. Ok I know there are help forums but it’s the time needed to rework the group ready to accept members and right in this busy time of the year…

****I’d be interested to know how other’s have coped with their merges.

I might leave some links of possible networks to try out. I have tested them and none offer anything as good as MSN. but it’s a starting point.

Please what is the link to world groups so I might take a look there?

NETWORKS for possible forums & groups

[listed below]

http://www.runboard.com
http://www.yuku.com
http://groups.google.com/
http://www.ning.com
http://www.delphiforums.com

Belinda

:Last one out turn the lights off please

However, I do love MSN Groups myself, and am struggling to find another site like it to move to. Having checked out Multiply, we have found it to be wholly inadequate for the needs of our group.

Check out http://www.ning.com/ though; I was quite impressed, although it still lacks enough to be unsuitable for our group. We may have to move onto message board software.

Spread the word!