Facebook archiving Old Groups proves a challenge for users

The migration tool for the old Facebook groups to upgrade to the new design seems to be causing challenges for a number of users.

When the new group design was launched in Oct 2010, we did wonder if functionality would be provided to migrate the old groups over to the new design. Given that the focus was for small groups of people rather than groups with hundreds of members, perhaps there would be a migration tool to move the group either to the new design, or over to a Page if that was the more suitable option.

Facebook offered the first migration tool in April 2011 for those using personal profiles for their business accounts and have followed it up this month with a tool to migrate certain old groups over to the new group design. Group members may have seen an alert at the top of the group and there is the ability to send the group admin an email requesting that they upgrade the group.

If your group is identified as suitable for migration, (Facebook state that it needs to have enough recent activity) you will see an upgrade option at the top of the group.

And this is where the challenge begins:

1. not all groups are being given the option to upgrade (groups not upgraded are archived)
2. admins for groups given the option to upgrade are not always able to see the upgrade option, even when their members can

There is a discussion topic on Facebook Site Governance with 11 pages of posts to date which illustrate the different issues users are facing and the level of frustration that some users are feeling about not be able to complete the upgrade. Some groups have large numbers of members and write that they are faced with the unwelcome prospect of seeing their hard work and investment lost. If you want to learn more about the upgrades and archiving, check out the Facebook’s help centre’s new topics about Old to New Group Migration.

The Web Analytics World Group is in the same position, we’ve received email alerts about upgrading to the new Group design but are not able to see the upgrade option.

We are going to use this as an opportunity to migrate manually over to a Page, something we should have done a while ago as a group is not the ideal route for our and our group members’ activity. Given the circumstances we believe this is the best way forward and hope you join us and other web analytics fans there.

For Web Analytics World it is a suitable approach, but it is not going to be an acceptable or even practical solution for some groups with thousands of members and who have invested many hours of work into creating and promoting the group. We’ll add any updates on the topic to this post as we spot them.