Last year many of us received news and messages letting us know that our group on Facebook was scheduled to be archived. This of course occurred when Facebook decided yet again to update (change) their layout yet AGAIN. Whether you’re a group owner or an admin you probably got this notification more than once. This was a controlled upgrade by Facebook in an effort not to disrupt the site too much by having everyone upgrading their Facebook groups all at once. This is similar to how they did the Page migration.
If you never selected the Upgrade option for your Group then your photos and discussions may have been lost. There was also concern as to whether all the members would carry over into the new group or not, but luckily they did. Those that were banned from the groups didn’t make it into the switch either so that’s cool.
One new feature with Facebook groups that many people probably don’t care too much for is that every time a wall post is made or anything is done in the group, members will get an e-mail notification. That may have only lasted for so long though because I think recently Facebook got the message and cut down on all the e-mail notifications. Before then (or still today) users have to go and manually adjust their settings if they don’t want constant Group updates/notifications sent to them. This is done in your settings. Just like everything else on Facebook (i.e. Chat, Privacy, notifications, etc..) you have to manually adjust it or turn it off if you don’t want to be bothered. An easy way to customize who you will and won’t get all the e-mail notifications from is by going to Account > Account Settings > Notifications > Change E-mail settings for individual groups. This should bring you to a list of all your groups and the option to select or unselect boxes.
The Group change also made it so you have to set up a group e-mail since Facebook converted their old inboxes into the new message system. You can only send out mass messages to group members now if the group has less than 250 members. Enjoy your new Groups or if you have a change of heart try creating a Fan Page. Check out the FB Emoticons fan page we converted to once our Group was being “upgraded”.
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