Yahoo Groups to be Shuttered

[JonL]

"Beginning October 28, you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded."

Download anything that matters, now.

Content you yourself generated/uploaded can be requested in bulk from the privacy dashboard, though it can take up to 30 days for them to send it to you.

[seneschal]

First Google Plus and now Yahoo eh?  Something tells me maybe these guys aren't our friends atter all.

[PhilHibbs]

I thought Yahoo Groups had died a long time ago...😁

[Qizilbashwoman]

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

I thought Yahoo Groups had died a long time ago...😁

there are some influential and important scientific and academic groups that still operate through yahoo groups lists because there was never a reason to change to somewhere else and lose all the past discussions. i belong to a few.

[PhilHibbs]

24 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

there are some influential and important scientific and academic groups that still operate through yahoo groups lists because there was never a reason to change to somewhere else and lose all the past discussions. i belong to a few.

I think that it is now clear that there always was a reason to change!

[Sir_Godspeed]

6 hours ago, seneschal said:

First Google Plus and now Yahoo eh?  Something tells me maybe these guys aren't our friends atter all.

Yeah, relying on these social media networks for fan groups is dicey.

Which reminds me that sooner or later Facebook is going to get shut down too. Probably later, but still.

It's probably too optimistic to expect a return to specific fan forums like it used to be back in the noughties.

[Lordabdul]

6 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Yeah, relying on these social media networks for fan groups is dicey.

Indeed, and that’s why I’m a bit torn inside when I see how much super interesting stuff Chaosium staff (especially @Jeff) post on Facebook groups when we know this is going to be a problem down the road (and I’m not going into all the reasons we should avoid Facebook anyway). I would love it if there was a company-wide mandate to post everything on Chaosium-owned/controlled platforms only (blog, BRP forums, etc.), and post only previews/linkbacks out to social media platforms. It’s already partially the case but like I said, not completely.

[SDLeary]

As a former mod of the RQ3 group, I have started to pull things off the site.

Does anyone know of any decent tools to archive the threads? Pulling them down one at a time seems somewhat cumbersome, but AFAICT yahoo has no mechanism for archiving of the whole group. I thought of printing individual threads too, but am not seeing that option at the moment either, though I do seem to remember that ability in the dark depths of time.

SDLeary

Edited October 20, 2019 by SDLeary

[nabda]

I know nothing of the process but I know that the glorantha digest archive had several yahoo groups already saved so there's definitely some automated way to do it.

I've never looked into the yahoo side of things so I don't how completionist it already is but it might be worth getting in touch with the archivist

[David Scott]

1 hour ago, SDLeary said:

Does anyone know of any decent tools to archive the threads?

I have used http://yahoogroupedia.pbworks.com/w/page/93006447/Chrome Application To Download Messages very successfully. It's my intention to eventually get them up on wellofdaliath at some point.

1 hour ago, SDLeary said:

As a former mod of the RQ3 group

Which group is this, it may already have been done.

 

Edited October 21, 2019 by David Scott

[SDLeary]

27 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Which group is this, it may already have been done.

 

Its the Yahoo! RQ3 group.

I believe that Lev did it a few years ago and put a link on the mailing list archive site, but the link returns 404. I've messaged Lev yesterday, still waiting on a response. I just want to be prepared should things have to be done rapidly.

SDLeary

EDIT: OK, this site is good. I was hitting the wrong link on the archive site. Its HERE.

Edited October 21, 2019 by SDLeary

[Charles]

Running a forum with a view to keeping up with technology, keeping the history for the long term (we are almost 30 years as an online community) and managing the occasional flame war is actually quite a difficult ‘task’. And given the great diversity of skills needed, can be extremely expensive.

We (as a community) have piggy backed off many ‘free’ providers that profit or hope to profit from us. Some of the providers have been community members who’s ‘profit’ has been the continued maintenance of our community.

When looking at the alternatives, both for the community and for Chaosium, I’m not sure that there’s better than opportunistically taking what’s on offer from the ‘free’ providers.