Yahoo Groups Is Winding Down and All Content Will Be Permanently Removed (vice.com) 82
Yahoo announced on Wednesday that it is winding down its long-running Yahoo Groups site. From a report: As of October 21, users will no longer be able to post new content to the site, and on December 14 Yahoo will permanently delete all previously posted content. "You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded," an announcement post reads. Yahoo Groups, launched in 2001, is a cross between a platform for mailing lists and internet forums. Groups can be interacted with on the Yahoo Groups site itself, or via email. In the 18 years that it existed, numerous niche communities made a home on the platform. Now, with the site's planned obsolescence, users are looking for ways to save their Groups history.
Eternal Memories. (Score:2)
So much for the internet being forever.
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The downward slide started with the demise of Yahoo Auctions. If they had bothered morphing into something else, they could have given Amazon a run for their money early on. Or if they had bothered waiting, people would have fled ebay for an alternative. Wouldn't it be nice if there were an alternative to ebay for the true one-off odds and ends?
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Wouldn't it be nice if there were an alternative to ebay for the true one-off odds and ends?
It would be nice, and I'm surprised that they don't have any serious competitors.
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Yahoo is super big in Japan meanwhile.
speaking of memories (Score:3)
Remember when they turned down Microsoft's offer of $31 per share (ca. $44.6 billion) in 2008?
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Pepperige farm remembers. PS, NSFW (cussing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Offline download tool (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Offline download tool (Score:4, Informative)
Or, you know, use a better free tool like wget mirror.
Man, I'm a member of a bunch of technical, ham radio, and motorcycle groups on there and I really don't want to see all that content and useful information go away. :(
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Or, you know, use a better free tool like wget mirror.
Man, I'm a member of a bunch of technical, ham radio, and motorcycle groups on there and I really don't want to see all that content and useful information go away. :(
Many years ago we did something like that for reasons which escape me now and saved the content of several groups. Not long afterward, Yahoo changed how the interface worked and added measures to stop "abusive access". So it is not as simple as crawling the forums anymore. That went along with TOS changes which forbid downloading your own content.
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HTtrack is free, it's a tracker that lets one download websites. I used it many years ago to grab entire sites, very handy http://www.httrack.com/ [httrack.com].
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Are you afraid of free speech, comrade?
Wow, Oath's anti-porn crusade continues unabated (Score:3, Informative)
Because there is a serious amount of porn yahoo groups.
I was worried it was Answers (Score:5, Funny)
If they got rid of Answers, generations of human beings wouldn't know how babby is formed.
Ah well (Score:2)
Back to Usenet.
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astraweb.com, $10 for 25 GBs which lasts forever if just doing text. aioe.org if you want free.
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Yes, I've heard good things about them too. I stumbled on aioe first when my ISP dropped usenet and was quite happy for the price. The paid account is nice as it has a long retention policy amongst other things and $10 for basically the rest of your life is a good deal.
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Wonder what will replace Yahoo Groups? Not FB... (Score:2)
I wonder what would be a suitable replacement for Yahoo Groups, other than Facebook. The main reason you want to keep groups separately from social networking is for privacy's sake, and also more of control of the hosted files.
obvious answer (Score:2)
/dev/null
Re:Wonder what will replace Yahoo Groups? Not FB.. (Score:5, Insightful)
groups.io
created by the founder of Egroups.. who sold it to Yahoo... and became Yahoo groups.
Re:Wonder what will replace Yahoo Groups? Not FB.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wonder what will replace Yahoo Groups? Not FB.. (Score:5, Interesting)
You could call it Network News, and distribute it over a simple text-based Transport Protocol. /s
For what it's worth, I had a lot of posts on Prodigy's message boards that are lost to the ether. I've chalked it up to the natural tendency of the digital world to succumb to entropy.
These online forums are an impermanent communication medium. We should live in the moment and accept that a big portion, except the most embarrassing bits, will be lost. It parallels the daily conversations of ancient civilizations have been lost to the winds of time.
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usenet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Was the best way to get warez back in the day, if your ISP didn't take measures and trim things....
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Someone needs to invent some kind of Internet-based message board system where messages are distributed widely across the Internet so there's no single point of failure. Maybe they could even make a dedicated protocol for distributing the messages efficiently and they could organize all of the discussions into some sort of hierarchy that makes it easy to find subjects you're interested in discussing. Oh well, one can dream. It's probably too advanced for today's computers. /s
But how does that facilitate user lock-in?
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I used a usenet group in 1986 (> or ) to find a used dishwasher for sale in my area. I succeeded; the portable dishwasher followed us a couple years later to Colombia, and a few years after that we sold it for about what we had paid for it plus shipping. Those were the days.
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> groups.io
Good suggestion.
Has ability to transfer much data from Yahoo Groups.
Friendly human being support and many nice features.
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A GUI, webcam, mic, chat, file transfer, a forum like social media, ads.
Worked with dial up and broadband.
It could have been the portal for the world to communicate with.
Now the world is left with "social media" and all its censorship.
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mewe?
the social network with privacy in mind.
or else one of the open source distributed social networks,
and if all else fails, back to usenet.
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I wonder what would be a suitable replacement for Yahoo Groups, other than Facebook. The main reason you want to keep groups separately from social networking is for privacy's sake, and also more of control of the hosted files.
We transferred several of our Yahoo Groups to Groups.io several years ago when they were beta testing their capability to the content.
https://groups.io/ [groups.io]
Lol who knew (Score:2)
Seriously, who knew that Yahoo Groups was still running?
It was a dreadful discussion platform 10 years ago and never got better. It's still the same awkward, lame, and barely functional heap of dreck today that it was a decade ago.
If you want to keep the ball rolling, download your content and stuff it into some FOSS forum like SMF or phpBB. Yes, it will require some conversion but it's not that difficult if you know a little scripting and some mysql or postgres or whatever.
Lol who knew-things cost. (Score:2)
It's the hosting bill that's going to be the problem. Not the technological underpinnings.
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Give me a torrent of the archive and I'll host a substantial portion of it. Others can do the same, problem solved.
Re:Lol who knew (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, they are obsolete and a pain to use, but there is a ton of useful data posted there.
I know there is, I've found stuff there myself.
If I had the time or interest I'd use something like PG Offline to scrape a bunch of the more interesting and/or active groups and replicate them on a forum script.
If anyone has a group there I'd say they should at least grab the stuff before it disappears; you can take whatever time you need to put it back up. But once it's gone, it's gone.
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The reason I never took Yahoo Groups seriously was that there were so many hobby-related groups that were "must register to read". (or at least to get the one or two tiny little zip files I was looking for) I get tired of signing up for every little thing under the sun, especially on Yahoo, which (surprise!) already has a sign-in. And then you got un-registered if you didn't go back for a few months. Register to post I can accept, not to merely read, unless you have something to hide from the general public
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Works much like any mailing list, except ads at the bottom where they're easy to ignore.
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Yea actually I thought I already remembered hearing this news about 11-12 years ago.
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Freecycle mailing list still runs on it and I'm sure many more
Usenet looking better every day. (Score:5, Interesting)
Paid services looking better every day. (Score:2)
Never left. The only reason people don't come back, while lamenting something about "corporate responsibility" for something they never paid for, is that it's no longer maintains the appearance of being free (part of one's ISP subscription).
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Remember when there was more than one port, and more than one client? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
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"...better ideas and technology."
So now we have better bot operators and trolls? That's not anything to be proud of.
Tools to download content ... (Score:3)
Found the following tools to download messages from Yahoo Groups.
I have yet to try them out. Please reply if you do ...
Yahoo Groups Backup [github.com] is written in Pythong, and says it can do public and private groups. But requires Mongo and Selenium, so considerable complexity for such a task.
Yahoo Group Archiver [github.com] is written in Python. It says "public groups".
Grab Yahoo Group [sourceforge.net] is on Source Forge, but seems old.
FIVE DAYS' NOTICE (Score:3)
This is how technology companies handle technology.
Re: FIVE DAYS' NOTICE (Score:2)
Somebody in Europe depends on Yahoo Groups and just left for a six-week holiday.
But, hey, they only have the resources of a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
It still exists?!?!? (Score:2)
It wound down a long time ago when they bought it and removed porn.
A whole year (Score:4, Funny)
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That site is bad. It's full of sketchy people and vacillates between toxic male syndrome to toxic SJW. It's a rats nest of social extremists, and I only go there if I'm really desperate for the content of a particular sub-reddit.
And there is still the open question of what to do in the future. We can all jump to Reddit, or whatever. But when they're brought and dismantled we get to play this game all over gain. There was a huge fracturing of community groups when Google+ ceased. With different portions of p
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Remember when communities used to buy a domain and host their own forum? People have just gotten lazy.
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I wonder how many of those forums have vanished over the years? As someone who has offered free shell accounts to people for the past two decades, I can totally understand people losing control over their servers because of internal politics or money. Let alone simply getting fed up with all the spam and hacking this sort of stuff attracts. It's very easy to get discouraged when the internet is full of animals who shit and piss on anything they can't eat.
Great content (Score:2)
Can other Organizations Archive the Content? (Score:2)
Can other Organizations Archive the Content? I know that a small Neutral organization continued the (rather pointless) existence of AIM and YIM as an independent service using reverse engineered servers. You have to have an account with them, but you can use a reconfigured either YIM Messenger or AIM with the service. So why does a similar organization preserve the content?
It's an architecture problem (Score:2)
One of the benefits [ipfs.io] of IPFS is that content no longer lives on one server. As long as one node has a copy, it continues to exist in the network. Moving to an architecture that is content-centric (instead of site-centric) would eliminate the problem of these massive content repositories going offline for one reason or another.
What is the actual cost problem? (Score:2)
As I read the fine print, it appears that Yahoo Groups is deleting the file storage portion of each Yahoo group site, What will remain is the membership list and the engine that remails messages to the persons listed on the membership list. What about the recently sent emails? I presume they will not be deleted.
Here is the economic question: What is the specific cost and revenue problem that drives this downsizing effort? Is the files portion of the Yahoo groups costing too much because of administration co
They is moving on up - to the cloud (Score:2)
to a deeeelux apt in the sky...
Everything Oath is moving to the cloud by Verizon decree.
This is now one less thing to move to the cloud.
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Here is the economic question: What is the specific cost and revenue problem that drives this downsizing effort? Is the files portion of the Yahoo groups costing too much because of administration costs (I mean the labor bill for US based system administrators), is it the inability of advertising to produce revenue when the file storage is accessed, is the static file base a legal problem because of possibly illegal file content? Or are the system costs getting too high such as the bandwidth cost or the electricity cost or the capital cost of servers and disk drives?
Yahoo pissing off the Yahoo Groups users over the years caused the highest volume and most sophisticated groups to leave. The exodus started after they "improved" the interface in 2013 and added features to stop people from copying their own content off. Most of the groups I participated in moved to Groups.io after Verizon purchased Yahoo figuring it was just a matter of time.
There isn't really a good alternative (Score:2)
There isn't really a good alternative ... been looking for one for a client anyway (they didn't want Yahoo branded ad filled stuff).
The few things out there are not as full featured, clumsier, and/or expensive.
I'm far more worried about Google groups. (Score:5, Insightful)
They have an archive of almost everything posted on Usenet going back to 1981. Has
anybody started backing up those archives?
It took a long time for that archive to be put together, often from old data tapes that have
been sitting in storage for decades before they were donated to Dejanews(IIRC) to be made available on the net. Sometimes the tapes were so old you would have posts
with subject and bodies like HHHJJJJJJJJIIIIIJJJIII and III&&*&*&&&&&&^^7777 because of the bit rot. Google then bought Dejanews.
I'm very worried at this point Google will just shut it down and throw it away like one of it's 2010s experimental services, and without notice.
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They have an archive of almost everything posted on Usenet going back to 1981. Has
anybody started backing up those archives?
Google started removing anything they objected to from their Usenet archive years ago so it is too late.
Sad, but it was coming (Score:1)
I have a list of about a dozen Yahoo groups that I've been watching for years... Sadly, they all are riddled with spam that noone bothers to clean up now.
Save the content? (Score:2)
Do they really advise saving the content after Yahoo went to considerable effort to prevent crawling the forums in an attempt to lock users into their service?
Fuck you Yahoo. That is why most of the groups I participated in left your service a couple years ago.
perhaps theyt have changed. now keeping emailing. (Score:1)
Yahoo Groups Backup Service (Score:1)