Was it a virtual AOL or was it a Tuna Colada
December 9, 2019 9:51 AM   Subscribe

Verizon announced (previously) that December 14 is the deadline to archive all Yahoo Groups content, and is actively preventing archival efforts. Verizon has blocked semi-automated scripts, disabled the PGOlffine backup tool, and banned the email addresses of volunteer archivists. The Archive Team estimates that will result in an 80% loss of the total Yahoo! Groups they where attempting to rescue. Once again, Yahoo! has found a way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse.

In the beginning there was ONElist, created by Mark Fletcher, that quickly merged with eGroups, and by 1999 had 260,000 active email groups, and was delivering over 1.3 billion email messages per month! Less than a year later Yahoo acquired the service for a paltry $432m (mefi).

Soon after Metafilter began cataloging a variety of efforts to escape Yahoo Groups. A common suggestion of late is to use Mark Fletcher's new service groups.io.

This is in part because Yahoo has a long history of acquiring a beloved technology only to shut it down. Like GeoCities. And Upcoming, killed with little warning, and no way to back up, which, just read this announcement post of the acquisition and try not to get all misty eyed. Then there was tumblr, which was sorta saved. But Yahoo's greatest crime was killing del.icio.us when they also choose to drop the ax right before the holidays.
posted by zenon (29 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
oh yes. my heart still tugs for del.icio.us

and what about flickr... just look at what they did to flickr
posted by Mrs Potato at 10:14 AM on December 9, 2019 [11 favorites]


Thankfully, though maybe because I'm not a power user, Flickr's new management feels miles better.

Man, I can't imagine the frustration. All that activity just gone, in a smoke.
posted by cendawanita at 10:24 AM on December 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


You can request your data from Yahoo -- supposedly this includes all messages posted to groups you are a member of, if I read the instructions right:

"Requesting your data from Yahoo -- you only have until Dec 14 to do this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 1qNCAgMN-Q9koFK1EzEFek2k4iFNLeHo03blIk20-H7s/edit"
posted by tavella at 10:40 AM on December 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


Why do they care enough to prevent archiving? Is it just corporate spite? I don't understand.
posted by hilberseimer at 10:40 AM on December 9, 2019 [21 favorites]


what about flickr... just look at what they did to flickr

Flickr got off very lightly in the Yahoo acquisition destruction maelstrom. Yahoo mostly ignored it other forcing yahoo logins. So the worst it really did was stagnated and missed opportunities.
posted by srboisvert at 10:48 AM on December 9, 2019 [4 favorites]


Why do they care enough to prevent archiving? Is it just corporate spite? I don't understand.

I'm also having trouble figuring out why all the archivers' accounts were banned at once, 9 days before the ax is scheduled to fall. Verizon responds with an extremely-weak "Oh, they violated the TOS so we HAD to ban them," which begs the question. Other than the bandwidth cost, I literally cannot think of any credible reason for them to be impeding the efforts of archivers to preserve twenty years worth of data on 4 months' notice.
posted by Mayor West at 10:55 AM on December 9, 2019 [13 favorites]


I am a member of three different groups devoted to Tolkien's created languages. They are all three pretty dead now that the movies are things of the past and the popular attention has moved on, but at least one of them was a moderated academic enterprise.

When the time comes, that's going to be some serious scholarship lost in time like tears in rain.
posted by Fukiyama at 11:04 AM on December 9, 2019 [10 favorites]


oh yes. my heart still tugs for del.icio.us

Pinboard, created by Mefi's own Maciej Cegłowski, is an inexpensive - and superior - replacement.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:06 AM on December 9, 2019 [23 favorites]


Fukiyama, please request your yahoogroups data, as described here,

Link

You can save that scholarship -- you will get all the messages from every group you are subscribed to, each under their own folder, as mboxes. You can submit them to the Save Yahoo groups as described there -- I'm not sure of their relationship with Archive Team, but possibly you can submit them to Archive Team as well.
posted by tavella at 11:53 AM on December 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


Arstechnica has a brief piece up.

As tavella notes you can still request your data (link to that google doc), but a big part of the issue with the the data that Verizon/Yahoo will give you is often incomplete and it does not include Group Photo's. Worse, it can take several days and users have been getting the wrong data file.

Aside:
Maciej Cegłowski somehow ended up buying del.icio.us and did that in part to maintain that history. He also, in what I imagine is a do not taunt happy fun ball tone, got to say "do not attempt to compete with Pinboard." If you want to go all the way down that rabbit hole I suggest this fine summary.
posted by zenon at 12:05 PM on December 9, 2019 [4 favorites]


That summary is a whole lot of fun.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:37 PM on December 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yahoo was the first "search engine" most people who were online at the beginning ever used. Of course, a hand-collated list of links didn't remain feasible for long and it never recovered its initial relevance. Whatever that thing is that calls itself Yahoo these days it bears little resemblance to the original.

Oddly enough, my old ISP outsourced its email to Yahoo/Verizon a couple years ago. It allowed me to change ISPs without having to change email addresses so I'm okay with that. Of course, I have other accounts I can use should they decide to bail on that as well.
posted by tommasz at 12:59 PM on December 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


I've been online long enough that I remember submitting websites to Yahoo! and being thrilled when they were added.

I hate that they're doing this, and I don't understand why they're actively blocking archival work. It's like they're burning down another Alexandrian library.
posted by hippybear at 2:56 PM on December 9, 2019 [7 favorites]


It's like DejaNews all over again...
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:02 PM on December 9, 2019 [6 favorites]


From zenon's Arstechnica article:
"I understand your usage of groups is different from the majority of our users, and we understand your frustration," the Verizon employee added. "However, the resources needed to maintain historical content from Yahoo Groups pages is cost-prohibitive, as they’re largely unused."
Is this Verizon employee saying it costs too much to access all the Yahoo Groups data, and that's why they're impeding the archival efforts? If so, that seems pretty cheap of them.
posted by Kevin Street at 4:32 PM on December 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


> Why do they care enough to prevent archiving? Is it just corporate spite? I don't understand.

> Other than the bandwidth cost, I literally cannot think of any credible reason for them to be impeding the efforts of archivers to preserve twenty years worth of data on 4 months' notice.

One possible explanation is legal risk. Does knowing about and failing to prevent bulk data collection on your users violate the GDPR or CCPA? Are you willing to pay your lawyers to come to a determination, and take on the chance that they might be wrong?

Shutting things down is free (at least in terms of dollars) and is unlikely to get you sued.
posted by The Notorious B.F.G. at 5:52 PM on December 9, 2019 [5 favorites]


Oh, the whimsy.
posted by flabdablet at 6:49 PM on December 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


I submitted a request for a download. I had emailed the moderator awhile ago, but he never got back to me. I had intended to wash my hands of it as I am only a passive fan of Tolkien and not any kind of expert on any of the languages, but tavella's plea cannot go unanswered!
posted by Fukiyama at 6:56 PM on December 9, 2019 [2 favorites]


I'll bet the reasons were technical. The archivers were manually subscribing to a great many groups, and so suddenly their systems had users who were probably subscribed to several orders of magnitude more groups than any had before. Probably a lot of ancient code started straining at the seams there. Easiest thing to do is then delete the source of the DOS.
posted by joeyh at 7:32 PM on December 9, 2019 [5 favorites]


Indeed. They've effectively created a problem by having a hard deadline in the first place. I get wanting to have a hand washing party, but a controlled trickle is much easier to deal with than a raging, fearful torrent...
posted by kaibutsu at 10:52 PM on December 9, 2019 [3 favorites]


This makes me glad I keep archives of the mailing lists to which I subscribe. Some of them are up in the millions at this point, though I did lose a small percentage back in 2006 or so due to a database bug.

Luckily, my mail server has no problem appending messages to needlessly large mailboxes, though full text searching them does give it fits.

What's really going to suck is all the utilities and documentation that many people put up on YG that will be gone forever. As the DejaNews disaster showed, most of the email traffic is likely to be duplicated elsewhere, even with no specific effort being made in advance. I am not the only person who has a mostly complete archive of the mail they have received over the years. The rest of the stuff Groups hosted is almost all going to fuck off literally forever, though. That makes me sad, but I've always been a hoarder of all but the most ephemeral data. Somewhere on a hard drive I have good records of how EFnet came to be free of much more than eris, useless though it may be. (Especially useless if I can't remember the passphrase for the PGP key I used to encrypt that and all my other archives from that era)
posted by wierdo at 12:46 AM on December 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


Yahoo was the first "search engine" most people who were online at the beginning ever used. Of course, a hand-collated list of links didn't remain feasible for long and it never recovered its initial relevance.

I literally found Core77 in 1996 by looking up magazines/industrial design
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:13 AM on December 10, 2019 [5 favorites]


Verizon reportedly blocks archivists from Yahoo Groups days before deletion [update] (Ars Technica)
UPDATE: Late Monday night, Verizon told Ars it would be extending the deletion deadline to Friday, January 31, 2020 at 11:59pm Pacific time.

"We are amazed at the vibrant community Yahoo Groups has become, which is why we want to support our Groups users through the next phase of the transition by providing a way to download previously posted content," the spokesperson said. Individuals can use a Yahoo tool to download their content.

"On Sunday, December 15, 2019, the content will no longer be available or viewable from the groups.yahoo.com site, but we will not delete it until all requests submitted prior to the above deadline have been completed," the spokesperson added.

Archivists, however, will still be prohibited from using third-party tools to scrape any content from groups, and any who do will be blocked.
They don't say why you can't use 3rd party scrapers, but that sounds like the likely reason people were banned.
posted by filthy light thief at 6:55 AM on December 10, 2019 [3 favorites]


Request submitted. I was in 10 groups, two of which were for an exceedingly niche part of my personal history (the origin of my username, among other things). I hope I get all that content!
posted by limeonaire at 11:22 AM on December 10, 2019


The built-in yahoo export is pretty inadequate from an archival standpoint. It gives you the messages, but strips a lot of important metadata from them. You get any files or attachments that you personally sent to the group, but files uploaded by others are not included. Stuff like that. By all means, submit the request to yahoo, it's better than nothing, but we can do better.

If you want to make a full export of a group that you're a member of, you can use the Archive Team's tool. The instructions on that page are fairly clear. You want the manual mode instructions. Add -w to the suggested command line to get an especially good archival copy. DM me if you need more. I'll even run it for you if you like, but that takes access to yahoo login credentials.

The banning is ostensibly for using scrapers rather than the built-in tools, but so far the only accounts that were banned were new ones that signed up using an email from a disposable email service.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 4:08 PM on December 10, 2019 [2 favorites]


FastCompany has an update which highlights Verizon's explanation for it all:
Much like Tumblr, Yahoo Groups is a platform for consumers’ content, and doesn’t align with our vision of bringing our consumers premium content from trusted sources. This is why we are no longer offering to host content on the platform.
What a vision. Must look good in a slide deck.

That piece also quotes user Nightowl's emotional reaction to all this. The wordpress site for Yahoo group moderators apparently has an owl theme, and the images for this update post remind me of the best of Web v1.
posted by zenon at 8:42 AM on December 11, 2019


groups website is pretty broken this morning, and the available evidence suggests they might have actually scaled down their fleet of servers. Where previously there were 12 numbered API servers that responded to requests, at the moment everything seems to be going to a single one for some reason.

If this is really what's going on, it's quite evil. Break your own site so you foil the people trying to archive it, while also maybe trying to blame the problem on those same archivists to reinforce your narrative.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 9:52 AM on December 11, 2019 [2 favorites]


In retrospect -- although they reverted to the Verizon Media branding, "Oath" seems to have been a very aptly chosen name..
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:46 PM on December 11, 2019


Things approved a lot over the course of the day. Current theory is that the tool most people are using to migrate to Groups.io got updated to work again and as a result there was a big spike of people hammering yahoo's servers this morning.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:33 AM on December 12, 2019


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