'WTF! MORONS!' Yahoo! Groups! redesign! traumatises! users!

'Vile, unfriendly interface' attacked by world+dog. But format stays

Yahoo! has told thousands of users who are complaining about the Purple Palace's pisspoor redesign of its Groups service that it will not be rolled back to the old format - despite a huge outcry.

The Marissa Mayer-run company revamped Yahoo! Groups last week, but it was immediately inundated with unhappy netizens who grumbled that the overhaul was glitchy, difficult to navigate and "severely degraded".

In response, Yahoo! told its users:

We deeply value how much you, our users, care about Yahoo! Groups ... we launched our first update to the Groups experience in several years and while these changes are an important step to building a more modern Groups experience, we recognise that this is a considerable change.

We are listening to all of the community feedback and we are actively measuring user feedback so we can continuously make improvements.

But the complaints have continued to flood in since Yahoo! made the tweak by changing its "classic" (read: ancient) interface to one dubbed "neo" that appeared to have been quickly spewed on to the interwebs with little testing before going live.

And - while the company claimed it was listening closely to its users about the new look Yahoo! Groups - it has ignored pleas from thousands of people who want it to reverse the update.

Yahoo! said in response to one unhappy camper on its official customer care Twitter account: "It is not possible to return to the old format."

The Register has asked Yahoo! to explain what's gone wrong. But at the time of writing it hadn't returned our request for comment.

El Reg understands that accessing the rebooted version of Yahoo! Groups on any browser initially led to all sorts of problems, with users reporting that they couldn't view messages properly and that it was impossible to make any changes to individual settings on the service.

The company said it had - so far - fixed some but not all of the bugs submitted by its miserable userbase. ®