Dear Everyone:

If you sign up with Grouply, you are required to give them your Yahoo

ID and Password, so that their system can fetch all the messages.

(That then allows them to download and mirror all existing and new

message postings on the group, postings made by every other member.)

Apart from that being a personal security issue (you should never

give your Yahoo ID or Password to another party), it has two major

problems for any Group and its other members:

- It violates Yahoo's Terms of Service (TOS) in that it allows

messages to be posted outside of the Group, without the written

permission of the authors of those messages. (Yahoo has just this

week written to this effect on its blog for group moderators.)

- It thereby also violates the intellectual property rights of all

those posters, because every message is the implicit copyright of the

writer.

- It also leaves group owners/moderators liable for any ramifications

of the transfer of such messages outside the Group.