Move your MSN Group

Is this service affiliated with Microsoft?

No, this is an indepented service, neither owned or authorized by Microsoft.  We've built this out to help the millions of MSN Group owners who find themselves abandoned and locked into having all their group data deleted in the next 2 months.  Read below to learn more about our company, our services, and our mission.

Can you really backup and move my MSN Group?

Yes, please see How it Works for more information or take the next step to Move Your Group.

What can be backed up from my group?

We can backup your group's message boards, web pages, photos, user account names, and all the content in your topics.  We cannot backup private messages as those are private to each user.  We may be able to backup other items from your group, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

What will the web address (URL) be of our Group's new home?

It can be anything you want!  Really.  MSN forced you to choose a group name that worked under groups.msn.com, but we'll move your Group to it's very own personal domain name.  You can choose between using something like http://our-group.lefora.com or we can set you up with your own personalized vanity domain name.

When is my MSN Group shutting down?

Microsoft is pulling the plug on your MSN Group on Feb 21, 2009.  You'll need to act fast to ensure we are able to backup and move your group.

MSN is a big company, how can I trust that you won't shut my group down in the future?

With so many internet web services available these days, it is hard to know the level of service and support you will get from a company.  Lefora is dedicated to one service - hosting discussion groups.  We are not Microsoft - they have hundreds of products and therefore need to cut the least profitable products at times.  We are motivated by making group discussion on the web easy and entertaining.  We're a dedicated team in San Francisco, CA, working alongside many web companies that you use every day (from AOL to Yahoo).

We're currently hosting over 40,000 groups, some as small as a few family members, and some as large as tens of thousands of people.  Our groups are free with ads, or you can pay a small premium to have the ads removed ($15/mo).  We host groups for many large enterprise comapanies who realize and trust we have no plans on abandoning them.

If you still need to be convinced that we're here to support you, check out our Support board which is incredibly active by other admins and our team.  There have been thousands of questions anwered, most time, within a few hours.

Why is Microsoft closing their MSN Group Service?

Microsoft is abandoning 100's of thousands MSN Groups! They are working on a new service called Windows Live Groups, but it is incompatible with the current groups and it won't even be available until the Fall of 2009!  Rather then build an upgrade path within Microsoft, they are dumping the groups.  They have asked group admins to move over to multiply, but as you know, it's not a full group service offering, it's missing many of the features a group needs (rich discussion boards, admin controls, etc.)  Multiply is a good social network and blogging platform, but it's not a good discussion board and group platform.

How much will this cost me?

Zip, zilch, zero!  This is a completly free moving and upgrade service.  See the next question for why it's free.

Why are you doing this?

We're the people behind another product - Lefora.com.  We've spent the past 2 years making the best group service platform that we can build and we're proud of our work.  We host tens of thousands of groups completly for free.  We do have ads on the groups, which make a little money on each group which allows us to make a real business out of this.  The ads are not intrusive, and we have a number of people who pay a small fee, $15/mo. to remove ads from their group - but that's completely optional. 

You're probably already familiar with ads within your group on MSN, our ads behave the same way.  Since we're a small company *solely* focused on groups & discussion boards, we've been able to make it into a stable business, not an offshoot - that's how Microsoft has treated MSN Groups - and that's why they're shutting it down and deleting your data.

We're dedicated to building the best groups offering the web has ever seen.  We started this endeavor when we got fed up with the lack of features available in traditional groups.  We use them everyday, from hobbiest groups, to gaming groups, to tech groups.

We've taken our many years of web development experiences and put them together to create what we believe is how discussions should happen on the web. Our Groups are social, engaging, easy to use, and most importantly - fun to interact with. We dread things like clicking through multiple pages, not being able to filter out annoying posters, dealing with spam, the necessity to create an account just to make a quick comment, staring at butt-ugly templates, never getting notified of responses to our questions, not being able to embed YouTube videos, etc. The list just keeps going on, we're sure you're familiar with our complaints.