I have a group I still care about. Here's how I'm archiving it:

    git clone git@github.com:andrewferguson/YahooGroups-Archiver.git
    python archive_group.py <group-name>

This is horrible.

Some Yahoo Groups must be still active as mailing lists, or at least an archive for some niche communities, and they have irreplaceable, valuable information. I don't know other groups, but I know the Tektronix oscilloscope group (TekScopes) has been on Yahoo for a decade, and it's often the only source of information about vintage Tektronix oscilloscopes that dated back to the 1960s, some were former engineers with firsthand experience who can help to fix your scope or identify a replacement part, and the mailing list archive has a lot of lost knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere.

Well, fortunately TekScopes migrated to Groups.io in recent years, which is good. But just think about other groups...

It gets better... [facepalm]

From Twitter:

  Today it was announced that Yahoo! Groups is 
  shutting down, and taking with it a piece of 
  critical national infrastructure: 
  the Oftel Yahoo Group which is used for 
  managing UK phone number assignments. 
  Yes, really: See Ofcom's website

Original tweet: https://twitter.com/erincandescent/status/118458732359973683...

“Anything you post on the internet will be there forever” meme is becoming less true these days. Closed gardens that get shutdown without any notice, dead links run rampant, full reliance on cloud vendors for data storage.

Seeing this made me donate a small sum to the Internet Archive, maybe you (dear reader) want to do it too? https://archive.org/donate/

Don't know if it's still true, but i heard once the the UK phone number portability system was run on a yahoo group.

(a quick google shows the rumors were true.. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/s...)

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848

9 years later and still spot on. Just waiting for the day they “sunset” Yahoo! Mail and delete everything.

About a decade ago I archived many Yahoo Groups I liked with yahoo2mbox. No idea if there are any similar scripts now.

I tried using hypermail to convert some of the mbox files into HTML so I could post them online, but for some reason hypermail doesn't seem to work on any of them. Thunderbird reads the files fine, though. If anyone has any ideas about why, let me know. I could even provide a sample mbox file if you email me (address at website linked in my HN profile).

The worst part is that there's one private Yahoo Group that I never was able to get access to that apparently was important in a hobby I've participated in. I guess that one's going to the bit bucket...

Edit: Archiveteam has information about other archiving programs: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups

What's the point of Yahoo at all anymore? Finance? I am at a loss of what it is they still even do.

Archive team[1] has some tools for archiving groups (if you've got some you care about.)

[1] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups

This is what I fear will happen some day to Stack Overflow (and other members of the Stack Exchange network), with HN, and with Reddit.

There's too much great content in private hands.

The writing has been on the wall for years. I use Yahoo Groups for several local community organizations and features would just randomly break for weeks at a time. There was zero support from Yahoo; it's obvious they no longer had any engineering resources assigned.

Is Google Groups the only practical alternative now? (Some people don't have Facebook accounts so that's not an option.)

So Yahoo doesn't do their directory any more, they don't do groups, and they don't have their own search engine. Why are they still keeping the lights on?

The announcement is confusingly worded, but if I'm parsing that right, Yahoo intends to nuke everything except the ability to mail a defined bunch of people from Groups? So no more web UI with message history, much less attachments, files, etc.

Pretty sad news. I get the feeling that, in general, no company wants to give users a way to share free-form content and have ownership over that content. Every new "social media" platform that pops up allows sharing only a very strictly-defined set of data, shared only in a limited way.

A lot of the open-ended nature of sharing on the web has gone by the wayside, while extremely narrowly-focused sharing methods take their place.

Flickr for example feels like some kind of relic, a holdover from an earlier time, where you can actually _join groups_ and share photos (incl. metadata!) in there and have discussions in those groups. I'm very thankful it still exists, and I dread the day it is shut down.

I used to spend a ton of time browsing Flickr groups related to my interests (R.I.P. "Macintosh" group!) as it was a perfect way to find great photos and some interesting discussion you cannot find elsewhere. I've tried to do the same on Instagram over the years, and it's just not the same. Browsing everyone who tagged their stupid coffee photo #macintosh is not even close to the same experience, and sharing a conversation with people is simply not possible in that context.

Not sure what else to say. It's just another casualty of the web I grew up with. The web I watch slowly disappear. :\

It's amazing to believe at one point, this used to be the de facto source of a lot of the information I would search for on the net. Oh how the times have changed.

RIP Yahoo Groups

The last traces of tech-centric Internet are being done away with... Only the ad-ridden cesspool remains. Sigh

There goes a lot of collective history... I hope archive.org is able to snapshot it.

Why does Yahoo always shut down their most useful products? They shut down Yahoo Boss Geolocation services, which at the time was among the most accurate geolocation services (look up an address, and get a latitude/longitude position). Besides Google which was more accurate, but had a restrictive license on their API, it was the best out of all we tested.

Back around 2000, I used yahoo groups a ton. Good times, now most of those groups (synthesizers) are on Facebook.

Is there any value left in Yahoo!'s services at this point? This is a genuine question.

They killed off all of the chat rooms on a mid-December as well. In fact, December 14, 2012. Curious. Watching Yahoo wither slowly over the course of so many years is fascinating in a morbid sense.

I am told that they had some very interesting technological endeavors, but this was not sufficient to save them, apparently. One clue has been watching their home page and the frantic amounts of "partnering" they've done, to the extent that they pushed much of it even out to the chat clients. That isn't the whole of it, but it does seem to point to a kind of desperation on their part.

Based on the yahoo post Groups is not going away, they are just disabling all the features except the ability to be a web only no email private group forum. Previously you could upload files to common areas, have polls, subscribe by email. The groups will still be there, but will be much less useful for many people. However the functionality will be similar to say here, people can create accounts and post messages.

Disabling links is unclear. Each Groups I think can have a list of links to things, but maybe they are saying they intend to filter all posts to remove any url references?

There seems to be a general trend from public to private / limited-group discussion platforms, at least among major providers. See also the G+ shutdown.

Any Yahooligans able to comment?

Yahoo Groups came from the acquisition of eGroups.com, one of the very early VC-backed pure internet services. Sold to Yahoo for $432m (in stock, sadly for them).

Geocities all over again.. Why can't they go into readonly mode? Or even a downloadable archive? How much storage could it possibly be?

Not that this is a the best example of this, and I'm asking this as an honest question: at what point should we be OK with data being ephemeral and legacy services dying? With things like Yahoo! Groups, AIM, etc., the world has mostly moved on, and while these announcements bring back some memories, I don't necessarily see them as a huge loss, either.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a free alternative? In an ideal world I'd be looking for a paid one but I'm a member of a community group with no real affiliation, so there's no mechanism by which everyone could chip in. Plus, the obvious free alternative is a Facebook group. I'd like to suggest an alternative if I can.

To do this without providing any tool for exporting data is proof of a lack of good engineering culture.

Ah snap. I have very fond memories of the HP DE100C Linux based console mp3 player group helping me troubleshoot problems back in the day, even an HP employee hooking me up with a new remote. It's sad to see them shut down.

trying to use yahoo-group-archiver,

hard coded some data into the yahoo.py file :

cookie_Y = '...'

cookie_T = '...'

and later assigning them :

    args.cookie_y = cookie_Y
    args.cookie_t = cookie_T

and using my username / password

getting these error messages :

logging in...

Exception raised on uri: https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/alesis-ion/messages {"ygError":{"hostname":"gapi1.grp.bf1.yahoo.com","httpStatus":500,"errorMessage":"Internal error: UDB Failed","errorCode":1001}} ERROR: Couldn't download message; 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url: https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/alesis-ion/messages Exception raised on uri: https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v2/groups/alesis-ion/files {"ygError":{"hostname":"gapi15.grp.bf1.yahoo.com","httpStatus":500,"errorMessage":"Internal error: UDB Failed","errorCode":1001}} Traceback (most recent call last): File "yahoo.py", line 485, in <module> archive_files(yga) File "yahoo.py", line 154, in archive_files file_json = yga.files() File "c:\Users\ITD\Documents\Python Scripts\yahoo groups 3\yahoogroupsapi.py", line 96, in get_json raise e requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url: https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v2/groups/alesis-ion/files

tried it on another group, same result.

Has someone encountered these messages ?

Im confused. Does this mean Yahoo Groups is shutting down?

I wonder how much this has to do with GDPR and other data regulations? Presumably Yahoo Groups has too little activity to be worth keeping in an active state. But even in a static, archival state, Yahoo would still be obligated to fulfill data requests for it, right?

It's situations like this that the idea of a 'permanent web' like IPFS resonates.

what could be the reason ?

Paging /r/datahoarder

Ignore the below; I was wrong.

~~Note that list content isn't going away as the headline implies, but instead all the files uploaded to groups.~~