Yahoo groups archives will be deleted

I'm not sure if this really belongs in this forum; feel free to move it. Perhaps this is off topic and belongs in the lounge.

Yahoo has announced has announced it will be shutting down its "groups" service. Yahoo will be deleting all files, attachments and conversations. The "list" functionality will still continue on, but there will be no content saved by Yahoo.

If you are aware of any analog photography related group hosted on Yahoo groups, please make sure that someone has downloaded a copy of the messages, or else the archived messages will be permanently deleted! I own a piece of software called PG Offline which allows Yahoo groups messages to be downloaded. If there is any group that has a particular interest to analog photography, let me know, and I can download a copy of the messages. It would be a shame to lose interesting analog photography content!

I'm so glad Sean manages Photrio well and takes care of backups. Many communities are not nearly as fortunate.

Is there any way how Yahoo's information could be put up online?

Good question. Groups.io offers a full transfer service, but you have to buy a one year subscription, which costs $110, so this is only viable for large groups. I'm willing to host the files on my webpage, but I currently don't have a solution for viewing the messages, so it would just be a straight download of txt files or similar until I can come up with something.

Good thing Sandy King moved the carbon transfer group over to Groups.io a few years ago. It's much better than Yahoo Groups.

iandvaag said:

Good question. Groups.io offers a full transfer service, but you have to buy a one year subscription, which costs $110, so this is only viable for large groups. I'm willing to host the files on my webpage, but I currently don't have a solution for viewing the messages, so it would just be a straight download of txt files or similar until I can come up with something.

Click to expand...

Please do so. I'm interested seeing the data, if it could be re-processed to viewable form.

vedostuu said:

Please do so.

Click to expand...

Well, I need to know the names of groups in order to be able to save the content.

I'm interested in analog stereo photography, so I've backed up several groups relating to that topic. If anyone is aware of the names of other groups that pertain to other aspects of analog photography, I would be happy to try and download them.

The content on Yahoo Groups goes back to the days when Yahoo acquired eGroups, so there are messages that date back into the 1990's. It's a real shame that Yahoo is callously throwing away all this content.

Andrew O'Neill said:

Good thing Sandy King moved the carbon transfer group over to Groups.io a few years ago. It's much better than Yahoo Groups.

Click to expand...

Yes, I agree! I'm also a member of this group.

Forever isn't what it used to be...

Nonwithstanding that critique at Yahoo, we should not overlook our own issues at Apug.


-) some years ago Sean deleted all threads at the "Lounge" that had not been active for some time. This took place without announcement and included threads of relevance. As threads on the history of photography or the history of the photo industry. Also anything general related to the photo industry.
Sean had refused to install a "History" forum, and "Industry News" was installed only much later, so the Lounge was the only outcome.
The respective threads are lost.

-) with the last major change to a new forum software Sean skipped all foreign language forums. Especially the Dutch one was very active for some years. Then it died. I then myself proposed its closing.
Hower the respective threads vanished completely, even in the listings of members postings the respective postings, let alone threads show up.
I assume that information got lost too.

I do not accuse Sean of bad intent at all, to the contrary, but in hindsight things went wrong.



By the way, I do not think any Yahoo groups posting made its way into the electronic part of my library. Likely as I was not aware of the respective post in first instance...

This all suggests that cave painting was most secure to save data for a long period ...

Film is dead, let's do rock scratching.

Yes, we should not take ourselves and our own scribblings and that at other forae too serious. But as others started whining, I could not resist chiming in...

AgX said:

Nonwithstanding that critique at Yahoo, we should not overlook our own issues at Apug.


-) some years ago Sean deleted all threads at the "Lounge" that had not been active for some time. This took place without announcement and included threads of relevance. As threads on the history of photography or the history of the photo industry. Also anything general related to the photo industry.
Sean had refused to install a "History" forum, and "Industry News" was installed only much later, so the Lounge was the only outcome.

Click to expand...

some of it might still be available through the Wayback Machine. :-/

Kiev report was very good group @ Yahoo, dealing mainly with Kiev and Pentacon six medium format cameras. Nokton 48, Europanoram (sp?) and few other members from Photrio were active over there too. It will be worth preserving it. Thank you for letting us know!

Paraphrasing a very blunt Southern woman of my acquaintance: Yahoo ain't worth a godd*mn sh*t!

Nothing on the internet or digitally stored has the presumption of permanence unless it is either personally embarrassing to one or could destroy their life.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Zenitcamera/info
When I was interested in Zenits I was a member there and there was a lot of good info.
Also here:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/dir/1600019203

I just checked, Apug is well copied at the Internet Archive, thus including the now missing forums. At some copies pages not show completely or in bad layout but after some crawling up and down for date one gets original layout. Of course the Lounge is missing as having been blocked from being crawled.