Last couple of times I've talked with my friends still working on Y! Groups, they mentioned they had finally gotten the ok to do a UI change. Well, its finally out. The new look is pretty clean, though I long ago used adblock to block all the annoying ads on the site, so maybe thats part of it. They do take up a lot more space with some stuff, and have some problems with vertical scrolling (this seems normal now for y! properties, they have so much room on top for the larger banners that it pushes the content down enough that you always have to scroll the top part off the screen). They have message summaries on all messages, not just the last 5 now, and I think searching may be better, but I haven't extensively checked. It looks pretty nice.

An aside, I haven't actually used the site itself that often recently, mostly using it via email, and I hadn't noticed that one of my "anyone can post" groups was just chock full of spam. I'd either deleted it one by one in my inbox without noticing it was on the group, or my own spam/virus filters caught the messages. Its nice that they make it so easy to delete messages...