This manual has been written to help out all the people that have great hardcore movies on their harddisks but don’t know how they can upload them. With this manual as guideline you can very easily setup your own yahoo groups and upload your files there. And of course post your uploads then at the HardCoreMovieForum! I have been using Yahoo groups for quite a while now and I have to say that, besides a few other storage sites, this is one of the most reliable ways to post. It is also one of the more satisfying, as the groups are rarely deleted by Yahoo, meaning that one upload will live for months and months etc.
Hope this manual helps you, feel free to ask questions about it in the forum! (http://hardcoremovieforum.com)
Cheers,
Instructions on how to setup a Yahoo group for uploading files
Creating a group – Step 1 of 4_
Creating a group – Step 2 of 4_
Creating a group – Step 3 of 4_
Creating a group – Step 4 of 4_
Setting up your group to protect your files
Interesting facts to know about Yahoo groups
In this instruction you will learn on a step-by-step basis how to create Yahoo groups, edit them and upload files to them. Also some tricks will be shown to see the status of your group.
But first things first: what you need to have is a Yahoo account. These are free to create, if you don’t have one already just go to http://mail.yahoo.com and signup.
What are Yahoo groups? In short Yahoo groups are places to store files and create your own little community with chats, polls and more of those things. It is the file storage part that is the interesting part, as you are able to share those files with everyone that have a Yahoo login account. Each Yahoo group can have up to 20MB of data, where the maximum file size for each file is 5MB. But more about that in the upload instructions.
Let’s start with signing in to Yahoo groups. Go to http://groups.yahoo.com for the group area of Yahoo. If you are already signed in, you will see in the left top corner something like ‘Welcome, <your login name>’. When it says ‘Welcome, guest’ you must first sign in:
Type in your Yahoo! ID and password and press on ‘Sign In’. Now you’re in and ready to start creating a Yahoo group. Press on ‘Start a new Group’
There will be four steps in creating the group, of course we will start with step 1 and go all the way through to step 4, this looks the most convenient way for most of us!
Step 1 is choosing in which category the group should be placed. As uploaders of adult material the best choice is to follow the instructions from Yahoo, as we don’t want childeren to be able to download the files. So the first category to choose will be ‘Romance & Relationships’:
A new screen will appear with two choices (at the moment of writing), ‘Adult’ and ‘Heartbreak’. I don’t have a clue why there is something called ‘Heartbreak’, and there is no need for that one. Press on ‘Adult’. Creating the group in this category will result in a warning screen when wanting to go to this group. There are a lot of categories to choice from in the adult category:
Just pick one you think is the most appropriate for your upload. After choosing the category of your choice press on the ‘Place my group in Adult……’ link to move on to step 2.
In step 2 it is time to name your group and setup some paramaters on how your group should be stored, how members can join and the type of moderation:
Name your group: The name you want your group to have.
Enter your group email address: The email address you will use for your group, usually the same as the group name.
Describe your group: Give a description for your group, its free text but you have to fill in something.
Select primary language: It is standard set to English, just let that one be.
Select directory listing type: As you don’t want the whole world to know the existance of your group, set this one to unlisted.
Select membership type: Best setting is ‘Open’, as soon as you are finished uploading and make the group name public you don’t have to take care of letting the members getting the files.
Select moderation type: Set this one to newsletters, you don’t want any postings in your group, do you?
Press the button to advance to step 3 of creating your group.
Step 3 is actually nothing, just a screen giving you some details about your profile and email address:
Just press ‘Continue’ to advance to step 4 of 4, also know as the last step of the creating process.
If you have done everything right sofar, Yahoo is reminding you that you are creating an adult only group by showing you the next screen:
If you don’t get this screen, you didn’t create an age-restricted group. Go back to step 1 and choose the right category. If you get this screen just press ‘I accept’ and the next screen will appear:
As the screen itself is telling you, this step is optional. Why they show it is a riddle to me, but ok, it is their system! Press on ‘Skip This Step’ to finish off creating the group. Yes, you have created the group already, it’s that simple! The screen that will appear looks like this:
The group is created, you get congratulated and you are shown the the link to your ‘group home page’. Save this link as this the link you want to be sharing with the rest of us later so we all can download your uploads!
Before you will start uploading, it is recommended you chance some of the settings of your group to be sure no one – besides you – will be able to upload and delete files to the group. If you are logged in to your group you will have a menu on the left. Press the ‘Group Settings’ link to get this screen:
There are many settings here, you can fool around with them as much as you want. The colors can be a very nice one to give your group the colors to give the group a different look. The one that needs to be changed is the ‘Features and Options’ settings. This one controls the accessability of the group. The values in the above pictures are way to much and they need to be changed. Press the ‘Edit’ button from ‘Features and Options’ to get to the following screen:
If you use the group for file downloading purpose only, then set all the options to the ones as in the above picture. With those settings the moderator (that will be you) has all the access (s)he needs and the members of the group can download the files without spoiling your uploads! After changing to the above settings, the ‘Features and Options’ in your ‘group settings’ screen will look like this:
That should be safe enough. Now it’s time to start uploading!
If you are in your Yahoo group, press on the ‘Files’ link in the menu. If you did not upload something already, the screen that appears will look like this:
You are presented with the following options:
Add File: the actual uploading of the file(s).
Create Text File: As it says, just create a text file in your group.
Create Folder: If you want to split up your group in folders this is the link to use.
In this instruction we will stick to uploading files, so press the ‘Add File’ link to start uploading a file. This screen will appear:
One restriction must be taken into account before you start uploading: A file can not be bigger then 5MB in a Yahoo group. If your file is bigger use tools like HJSplit to create parts that are not bigger then 5MB. And if you want to keep the 56K users as your friends, you might even want to upload parts no bigger then 2MB a piece, as bigger files cant be downloaded with slow connections.
Having said that, let’s start uploading. Behind ‘File Name’ you have to fill in the file you want to upload. You can use the ‘Browse’ button (‘Bladeren’ in Dutch, can be anything in your own language!) to point to file with the open file dialog. You can additionaly give a description to the file. Do not mark any of the check boxes. Your upload screen can then look like this:
Now all you have to do is press the ‘Upload File’ button and wait. Here is the tricky part: the upload will proceed without interaction, meaning that after pressing the button once you will see nothing happening. DO NOT press the upload button again, you just have to be patience. If the upload is completed the next screen will appear:
The file you have uploaded will be shown in the list of files in the group. In the right of the screen you will see how many KB of the 20480 you have used. See the extra info at the end of the document for some discussion about the download limits of the groups. Repeat this uploading procedure till all your files are uploaded. That’s how easy uploading is to Yahoo! Groups.
Some other menu items that are handy to know about are the group activities and the members section. In the group activity you can see all users that have signed in to your group and also when they have canceled the membership with your group. Just have a look at it, you will be surprised how many people will visit your group, many times the group will pass the 500 active members, which is good for the download limits. This is discussed a bit further on. A look at the members section gives this screen:
This group has one member (me!). The blue star behind the name indicates that the user is the owner of the group. Now don’t ban that user, as you will lock yourself out… ;-)
As you now know you have a lot of control over Yahoo groups and they are very reliable! Hope to see your upload posted soon at the HardCoreMovieForum!
Yahoo have limited the bandwidth that can be used on a daily basis from their groups. This is a pity for us, but understandable from their point of view. The daily download limit however is not one fixed size, but grows with the number of members. So the more members your group has, the bigger the download limit will be. An new group will always start with a limit of 72000KB:
However with every member extra the download limit will rise. One of my groups has a ‘max allowed’ of 640000KB a day because of the big number of members. That is 640MB per day! So advice the people that join your group not to unsubscribe from the group after they have downloaded the files, as this will keep the download limit high.
Another issue is the ‘daily’ limit. In the traffic screen (you can see that one by putting /straffic behind your group link) you see the dates and times that downloads have occurred. Each download entry will dissappear after 24 hours. That means that if the downloads are spread over the day (you can’t control that of course) the whole day long people will be able to download. And downloads are only logged as traffic after the download has completed. If someone started 4 downloads at the same time while the limit is just about to be reached you can get well over the limit. Once I had a ‘max allowed’ of 128000KB while there was actually 240000KB downloaded due to the fact that a lot of users started to download at the same time before the limit was reached!
In a group you have room for 20480KB of files. But no matter how little or how much you put into the group, the download limit sizes will be the same. It is therefor better to put something like 10MB in a group instead of using the full 20MB. This way the download limits arent reached that fast and more people will be able to download.
After you have posted your group link in the forum you will notice that usually within the hour the download limit has been reached. The great thing about the groups that they will be there for as long as you don’t delete them. Sometimes Yahoo will delete them for you, but that happens rarely. People who want to download the files just have to subscribe to the group and try to download every now and then. Usually after a day or 3, maybe 4 the files can be downloaded without a problem as most people have ‘forgotten’ the link.
I have written this instruction on how to create and upload Yahoo! Groups especially for the HardCoreMovieForum (http://hardcoremovieforum.com) where I am on of the Goblins. Hope you can do something with all this info and hopefully you will start posting great movies and post them at the forum!
Cheers,