Yahoo Groups Shutting Down - Dec 14, 2019 (UPDATED)

[morgandawn]

(Updated Oct 25, 2019)

Starting Oct 28, 2019 no new files (photos, documents, etc) will be allowed to be uploaded. Starting Dec 14, 2019, Yahoo Groups will be limited to emails only - functions like digest will be eliminated and all files and photos will be deleted. Admins will have limited tools and all groups will be invite only. And archives of existing messages will not longer be accessible.

What To Do?

I have a step by step guide here. The short version

1. Admins - back up your Groups and decide whether and where to move
2. Members - back up your Groups - don't leave this to the admins.
3. Everyone - consider documenting Yahoo Groups on Fanlore, help spread the word

The OTW has made an announcement. Their Open Doors preservation program is open to  providing storage of Yahoo Groups backups that are assembled by moderators and non-moderators alike. Details here.

Fans are gathering on a Discord Channel to chat and ask for and give help:  https://discord.gg/ek2xFyJ (updated invite)

Please follow the Yahoo Group Rescue Tumblr for updates

 

Comments

[greerwatson]

I keep seeing references to "public" and "private" here. Is the later term the same as "restricted", i.e. moderated membership?

I've found quite a few FK groups that have restricted membership but open archives that anyone can read. Are these saveable? I'm working on an old, cranky laptop; so I can't download any program to grab the files.

Vid show Playlists

[morgandawn]

The Archive Team (which is the non-fandom archive effort) considers 'public' to be any group we can read without logging in and any group that has open membership (anyone can become a member if they click on the join button

Private is the same as restricted -you need to be approved by a moderator to both join and read

But then it gets weird...open archives (any human can read) but membership is moderator approval. I think those might be acceptable to the Archive Team. Note: they do not accept file submissions from other people. even moderators. If a moderator wants their group to be archived, you must contact the Archive Team directly. They have instructions https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z-lODnyXsE2kiu8uL01L--10nDq3b_lowT88aB447-E/viewform?edit_requested=true

They will accept suggestions of which public groups to archive from anyone (see the form above).

What the OTW will accept I don't know (right now they seem to be saying: any group you can read without becoming a member and any group where you are a member...but all of this needs to be worked out. My advice is to grab now, take a snapshot of their info page which shows the membership type and the fact that the messages can be read by anyone.

Re: Vid show Playlists

[greerwatson]

"But then it gets weird...open archives (any human can read) but membership is moderator approval."

I'm not sure this is actually all that "weird". Privacy is obviously not the issue (otherwise non-members couldn't read the posts). However, wouldn't restricted membership be protecting them from spam? I can totally understand that being desirable!

Re: Vid show Playlists

[morgandawn]

"weird" as in there is no rhyme or reason when this is applied. It is not an option for current Yahoo Groups. Or it was not. Either way Yahoo no longer sorts or categorizes groups - you are either public or restricted. And your messages may - or may not - be open.

Re: Vid show Playlists

[greerwatson]

I've hit three groups in which membership is restricted but posts are readable and at some point there's a post that says something along the lines of "We've always been a public group, but we're getting spam so I'm putting us on restricted membership". Continued readability may (or may not) have once been an option in such instances.

All public Forever Knight groups I know about have now been entered into that form you link to.

As the old laptop can't take fancy new software, I'm now copy-pasting messages into Notepad and saving as text files. It's slow going, to put it mildly.

However, I have completely collected one Very Important List: fkwarleaders. All the backroom posts by the faction leaders in four wars. It's a restricted group; but, as I was a scribe in the last war, I was admitted to membership. One brand saved from the burning!

Private vs Public Yahoo Groups

[greerwatson]

Here is some additional information on the restricted/open and private/public thing.

The defunct FK Yahoo Groups, VachonLovesNickFic and NickLovesLacroix were both open membership groups whose archives could only be read by members. The links lead to their homepages on the Wayback Machine (from 2002 and 2001 respectively).

If you look at the Group Settings on the far right, you can see that "Open membership" and "Archives for members only" are listed separately. This suggests that—whatever the current situation—at one time they were indeed separate options.

Secondly, the Raven Awards Yahoo Group (now a restricted group whose archives are open to anyone) originally had open membership. In 2002 they started to have spam comments, to the despair of the moderator. Evidently people provided off-list advice, because in Post No. 1223 (22 November), the list was taken to restricted status. However, the archives continue to be readable by anyone, presumably because privacy was not an issue.

Archiving Yahoo Groups

[lmemsm]

I've put what information I could find on archiving programs for Yahoo Groups on my own dreamwidth page:
https://lmemsm.dreamwidth.org/11107.html

While I've personally had no luck with the archiving programs out there, I finally was able to successfully download the backup from Yahoo Groups itself of the groups I belong to. Not sure how much information it provides, but it includes groups I'm a member of, not just my own mailing lists. Would be happy to make the information available for any lists that don't have an issue with the information being made public.