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

[morgandawn]

My trial version of SQLLite expired so I cannot test. What do the messages look like?

[morgandawn]

I am testing the Chrome add on on Chrome 77 and so far the "Save As" works (saves as raw text file)

[morgandawn]

my draft install instructions for the Chrome extension

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oRB7yF-QKqUEd76-dKxPh7ajlka4c7--EMnUIZDudrU/edit?usp=sharing

[shadowscast]

SQLiteStudio is free and open source, according to its "about" thingy.

As an example, if I click on the contents of a message I sent on 2001-07-14 19:20:21 (message #251 in the listing; I can see the message #, the subject, and the contents of the message), I get a text box with:

Hi out there. Me again.



So, now I'm working on that fic I mentioned. My very

first. And I've got what I would consider the first

part done. Now I'm wondering about this custom I hear

of called beta reading...



I've never written a fic before in any fandom, but

I've read enough stuff to have a vague idea of what

beta readers do. I guess that (depending on the

reader/writer relationship) they'll do the good ol'

grammar, spelling, and consistency checks, and

possibly constructive criticism about plot,

characterization, technique, or whatever - depending

on how involved they are.



So... should I have a beta reader? Could I have one?

Is anyone interested?



To give anyone interested an idea what they're getting

in for:

It's a Mac/Vic story, very angsty, h/c, with Mac doing

the hurtin' and Vic the comforting. It's, uh, about

6000 words now and still pretty g-rated, but I'm

getting there. :)



My greatest need from a beta, I think, would be to

make sure I'm not bizarrely contradicting canon (since

I still haven't seen all the episodes - though I have

seen the pilot now, thanks so much Carla!!). Other

helpful suggestions are also welcome, and moral

support would be nice. :)



Bye for now,



Shadowscast



_______________________________________________________

Do You Yahoo!?

Get your free [Bad username or site: yahoo @ ca] address at http://mail.yahoo.ca

(Actually it includes html formatting, which I can't show you verbatim because Dreamwidth is going to render it.)

I might not be describing it very well; I only understand maybe 25% of what I'm doing here, though I'm certainly in the process of trying to educate myself!

[seagull2eagle]

How do we update our form entries from 'pending' to 'complete'?

I've finished with RRyaoi and am going on to YYH now.

[morgandawn]

Doh...I need to fix that. I'll edit the spreadsheet

[morgandawn]

Doh! SQLSource!! *runs off to look

[shadowscast]

Since I don't really understand what I'm doing here, I might not be telling you all the important things, but if you ask me any more questions about it I'll do my best to answer!

[shadowscast]

Sort of relatedly but not really importantly—I think I just found the message where I approved your membership to the Yahoo RatBoat mailing list (the very mailing list I am currently archiving), on November 13, 2013! (Unless there's another fannish Morgan Dawn out there.) Small world!

[king_arthurs_muse]

Hi! Thanks for this! I'm the owner/admin for kingarthurfanfiction and I see that someone has added my group to the archive list. What does that mean? And thank you to the person who did it, because I have so little time to do anything! But I would like to participate in anything I can.

I am not going to keep the group active, but I do want the emails etc accessible. Let me know what I can do, if you have the time or anyone else does.

I'll read through this post in detail later today. I also just created an account at Fanlore, and will look at that too.

[morgandawn]

Post to your mailing list about your plans. And send me an email so I can put you in touch with the person downloading. The two of you can decide what to do with the email text files.

[chrystalline]

Thank you for detailing this. I'd given up on the current version of Chrome because I couldn't find the apps bar at all. Right click didn't work for me (I had tried that) but you inspired me to try again and keep looking. I don't know if it's because I have Win7(Pro), but the only way to get that toolbar was to go to Settings and enable Show Bookmarks Bar.

When I did this the first time with the old version of Chrome, I just used Save. I saved a copy first to be safe, and then manually changed the file extension to MBOX. This can then be imported to Thunderbird using the ImportExportTools NG addon. The imported MBOX shows up as a folder with the same name as the MBOX file, including the extension. The email messages have the timestamps and subject lines as normal, but sender email addresses are truncated. I still haven't figured out which 40 messages are missing from the download, though.

I also found a link that's supposed to be Yahoo providing download of Groups data. I've put in a request, will let y'all know what I end up getting:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/getmydata

The Yahoo help page that describes the privacy dash is here:
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/download-data-privacy-dashboard-sln28671.html

The actual privacy dashboard for all Verizon properties is here:
https://verizonmedia.com/policies/us/en/verizonmedia/privacy/dashboard/index.html

Surprised me; I hadn't noticed when AOL became Verizon.

I don't know how long it will take for Yahoo to let me know that my data is ready for download, but I will certainly report back with what it gets me. I know when I did something similar with Apple it took several days, so I'm trying to be patient.

[morgandawn]

Thank you. I added the note about Thunderbird to the doc

[chrystalline]

Thanks! I've been trying to share the word with my groups. Figured out the missing messages were deleted from the archive. Yahoo numbers the messages, and the numbers don't change just because the member and/or moderator deletes a message that came before.

You can add FuRenR to the completely downloaded groups, then, barring the deleted messages. I don't know if anyone still has those.

[king_arthurs_muse]

I have posted to my list! I had done that yesterday, but sent out an addendum today.

Where would you like me to email you? Thank you again for your help with this, it's much appreciated.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what this last part that you wrote means

"You can add FuRenR to the completely downloaded groups, then, barring the deleted messages. I don't know if anyone still has those."

M.D. not logged in

[chrystalline]

Oh, sorry. From context of some of the other comments, I thought you were keeping a spreadsheet of YahooGroups that have been fully downloaded or are in the process of being downloaded, so I figured it should be added to the list. If I misunderstood, I apologize. I was only trying to help where I can.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes I am updating the spreadsheet. Just juggling a lot of balls...or groups.

[renenet]

Thanks so much for the heads up and the helpful how to info! Following your suggestions today.

[chrystalline]

Completely understand that. I found the form and submitted it that way, though I wasn't sure how to answer the moderator question. It's a subgroup of another group, and over there someone's asked for permission to host everyone's stories on an archive, but I wasn't sure if that counted.

I also collated the best I could find for alternatives, but I made it my own post to try not to bombard you again over here:
https://chrystalline.dreamwidth.org/728.html

[morgandawn]

Looks great. Suggestions

1. Add in big bold letters - Adult Content not permitted on Groups.io (or Google Groups). Don't want people shelling out $110 only to be kicked off later

2. Suggest Dreamwidth as an adult content/fan friendly alternative. it allows explicit material, is free, threaded conversations, privacy locks and more. Image uploading is limited to 500MB free accounts and 1.5GB paid accounts

[chrystalline]

Good idea. Hope you don't mind I copy/pasted without much editing. I don't have a lot of traffic, having been mostly dormant for years, but I wanted to help.

[doranwen]

Have you been able to export the messages to HTML, as the website says you can? I haven't installed it yet myself, just been trying to back up all the groups I'm a member of (and one of them had over 50k messages so that took some hours), plus any more I can become a member of in time. :) I figure once the backing up is over, I can figure out what to do with all the stuff I've backed up…

[morgandawn]

Export to HTML using PGOffline? Yes, but I have a paid subscription.

[doranwen]

Ooh, I had not heard of FanFicFare. Mostly because I use Calibre only when absolutely necessary. I am very picky about organizing my digital files my way, and Calibre states outright that their whole purpose is to organize the files for you. So I use it as a converter when I need one, but not for anything else. However, I may have to change this, because while I'm quite happy with FanfictionDownloader (not the precursor to FanFicFare, but the unrelated program) for ff.n files, there are a couple sites that would be soooooo much easier to grab stories from. I was going to resort to manually creating epubs for those (which I'll still have to for some), which I'm pretty good at, but this will be much faster for at least that handful of sites! So thank you for mentioning that!

For an example of my extreme pickiness about organization, I ended up creating a database this summer just so I could find the fics I wanted to find, and make lists fitting specific criteria easily. One of my friends just laughed when I told her and said "that is so something you would do", lol.