Yahoo! Groups! to! shut! down! completely! on! December! 15!... Tens! mourn! Yahoo! is finally killing off Groups at the end of this year, after having launched it almost two decades ago. Once a bustling corner of the internet for netizens to advertise items, share information, or socialize with one another, Yahoo! Groups is now a husk of its former self, overtaken by the likes of Reddit, Facebook, and …
Marissa Mayer's appointment: what does it mean for Yahoo? --- Giving the former Google executive the job should reinvigorate a company that had been drifting for years
"Everytime I hear about Yahoo, I expect to learn they're closing shop"
It's just a brand of Verizon now. The original company is already gone; they sold off the main Yahoo business (including the name) three years ago, then finally disappeared completely last year when they sold off their remaining assets and liquidated themselves.
Yep — but even before that, the discussion-groups were run by ONEList. eGroups was originally an email archiving service launched around the same time, and the two companies merged a year or two before Yahoo bought them to create YahooGroups.
Also, El Reg is incorrect about another thing: both ONEList and the eventual eGroups allowed owners to set their list to either allow all messages, only allow messages approved by a moderator, have new accounts (or ones whose owners had misbehaved) moderated either for a set amount of time or until the owner/mods cleared the status.
Yeah... not especially fond memories of a group whose moderators evidently included someone who took a dislike to me and silently suppressed all of my contributions (as far as I could tell). And it was a while before I noticed that, which is by design evidently. No response, no forgiveness. Mind you, another forum - I'm going to call it Dosshouse - seems to have done that to me. Maybe it's the effect I have on people generally.
I'm glad other people also recall the eGroups origins: "Launched in 2001", my arse. I was using eGroups in the 90s, and a very useful means of communication it was too, when you had to keep an eye on the phone call charges and mostly went online just once a day to slurp down your new email messages and usenet feed, and then hung up.
I'm a member of several fairly niche Yahoo groups covering technology stuff, of which two are still active.
One is in the process of migrating to groups.io and the other has just started discussing it. The files sections have already been archived, and I think the message history will be part of the groups.io migration.
The inactive groups are going to just disappear though. In most cases the admins don't respond to messages, so a proper migration is impossible. A shame, as there's a lot of technical information that's going to be lost.
"A shame, as there's a lot of technical information that's going to be lost."
Not just technical ... a lot of historic groups fall into the same hole and information is lost. I've managed to archive a few sites that marry in with my genealogical archives but others will not be so lucky.
Y! made it pretty difficult to get info out of the groups even when you owned the group. As mentioned elsewhere a lot of active Y! groups migrated to groups.io, in our case mainly because it's one of the few that still support email-only operation and we (still) have some very web-averse members...
There was a lot of traffic on the groups.io forum around Y! groups whose owners had either disappeared, or weren't interested. Y! were completely unhelpful so there will be a lot of active groups whose archive will basically be lost.
ArchiveTeam did! https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups
It was very difficult. They made a script to allow people to manually sign up accounts and join groups (since there are captchas). Once signed in, the credentials of that account were then sent to be archived by other people running scraping workers.
I am/was a member of a local history group on Yahoo, and had to quickly gaffer-tape some code together to suck out all our files from the files area. Nearly two decades of research that could have gone up in smoke. We've moved the group over to another provider, and have archived the files as a big blob that needs somebody to take the time to tidy it up.
I faced the same problem for the posts on four Yahoo! groups I maintained. After grabbing all files, I wrote a bit of C code to 'launder' them (remove lots of Javascript cruft and turn them into basic HTML with irrelevancies stripped), plus an index to said basic HTML files, which I could then put on my own server. On the off chance it'll actually help you (or somebody else) :
C code to 'launder' Yahoo! group post blobs
(top of the file explains how it all works). An example of the results (probably should look at this first to see if it's actually anything you'd be interested in) :
It's really a shame... I was a member on the original service when it was called ONEList (1997–1999), through the eGroups merger (early 1999), early years of the YahooGroups buyout in mid-1999, then intermittently after that — and all three were far more user-friendly than the alternatives available now. I tried participating on one of the two main alternatives, since a group I'd been on before moved its archive there, but it was just too much of a PITA to bother with.
Also, moderation controls over the list and individual users were available on ONEList/eGroups before YahooGroups bought them out. (I spent far too much time in college in 1998–1999 manually approving messages for a very active 2,000-member discussion group that kept having massive flamewars over stupid things.)
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