Trouble unsubscribing

Occasionally you get a member who is having trouble unsubsribing, by the time they've got round to contacting the mods team they may be quite irate as a result of numerous unsuccessful attempts to unsubscribe. They'll probably be on individual messages and be completly swamped with posts. They almost certianly won't grasp that unsubsribing from a yahoo group is an automated process that doesn't in any way require imput from the moderators.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/manage/manage-26.html

Some reasons a member may be having trouble unsubsribing and some solutions:

arghhhh! I think I need a flow chart here

• They just really can't figure out how to do it (yahoo isn't the most intuitive interface)

• They've set up two accounts with the same email address and have only unscribed from one

The first thing to do when a member is having trouble unsubscribing is to have a look for them on your membership list. In the above situations, when you do search in members you should see them. In which case you can either remove them yourself or send them instructions on how to do it.

If they don't appear in your members list, it could be for a number of reasons:

• they've managed to unsubscribe from your Freegle group but are still subscribed to others

• they've subscribed with an email address other than the one they're emailing you with

• they are unaware of, or haven't accounted for yahoos delays (It can take up to three days for yahoo group posts to stop arriving but usually its pretty instant)

• It's a yahoo glitch (these are suprisingly common actually)

So if you can't see them on your members list, first of all ask them if they are emailing you from the email account that gets the freegle posts, and then ask them to forward you one of the posts. this will enable you to eliminate the first two options.

Unfortunately, Yahoo groups have been known to continue sending members emails well after they've unsubscribed. As a moderator there is one trick that does tend to sort this out, you can 'preban' a member for a period of about 24 hours and then unban again. This usually stops emails.