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

[shadowscast]

Er, sorry for the spamming, but I'm learning as I go! I wanted to mention that I just discovered that the table produced in the way that I just described won't include the information about who sent each message in an obvious way. However the info is recoverable; there's a column called "person," and the number in the cell will identify the sender of the message (with the numbers being matched with names on a separate table called "person").

[doranwen]

No problem! I'm sure I'll come back here and poke at this when I get to exporting and all.

*headdesk* I just realized… it would've been smarter for me to create a new db3 for each group. I've got multiple groups saved into the same db3 file. Is it still possible to separate those out or will it smush all of those into a single export? (I will totally separate them from now on!)

And I do know a bit of SQL now since I taught myself (with copious amounts of help from kind souls on the OpenOffice forum) how to create a database this summer. I'm still not super experienced in creating queries and whatnot, but those tables can be easily matched up that way. You do a SELECT and grab the name column from the person table along with the data from the table of the messages, and you have to add a line that goes WHERE "person"."personID" = "messages"."personID" essentially (I don't know what the actual table info is there so I just made up names so it's clear what's going on). But I did all my SQL queries with a LibreOffice Base files, so this might be a bit different, we'll see.

[shadowscast]

Is it still possible to separate those out or will it smush all of those into a single export?

Since I've only downloaded the one group, I can't really say.  When I was doing the export it looked as though, if I had more than one database, I could choose to select only one of them.  What I don't know is whether the program would generate (read? differentiate?) multiple databases from one .db3 file if you'd downloaded multiple groups.

[doranwen]

I just realized the very simple solution... copy the database as many times as there are groups, rename each one to the group name desired in it, and then go in and delete the ones that will be kept in other groups. Can't believe it didn't occur to me till now!