Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/oath-makes-you-swear.html
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Perfect example of fuckery to machinists-
There is a special yahoo group dedicated to making a special machine I have supplies and iron castings to build, called the Quorn cutter grinder.
Information on using this machine is very sparse outside of a single book written by the man who created it except in that Yahoo group where people who have made it explain advanced uses of it and details on building it correctly
There’s only one company left that even makes the parts to make the machine and it’s not a machine you can actually buy you have to make it from scratch.
With this Yahoo group disbanding forcefully now, I may lose a lot of the ability to use the machine for what I bought the metal castings for, which were around 350$.
I was just about to this winter start working on it, and now I am going to have to try to download everything that has ever been posted if I can even pull that off in time
This is why I hate trusting American companies or any company to hold onto any form of communication or anything like this because now a community of precision machinists is going to be fucked over.
Verizon can go fuck itself.
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So say we all.
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I wonder if this is how the internet will scrub itself. That embarrassing Juggalo phase in Yahoo groups - gone. Maybe in the far future another company will scrap Twitter and all the archives because almost no one cares about it any more.
Well now I feel for something like this. I am sure there are other niche pockets of info that are still relevant. Surely someone with a bit of knowledge could spider and archive your group?
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Once in a while, Google surfaces a Yahoo Groups result that (amazingly) is useful for me. If they want to shut down further posting, fine, but yeah, there’s no good reason and even no good business case for deleting the archive. In a previous life, Oath executives would have been tasked with lighting torches to burn the Library of Alexandria.
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I think they’re deleting uploaded documents, pictures, etc. not posts. Posts will remain, though whether they are viewable by non-members still remains to be seen. Posting will require manual admin approval. The good news is, there are still a good bushel of alternatives and self-hosted options. However, Nextdoor is NOT one of them.
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Internet Archive, or so I’d hope, even if Yahoo doesn’t volunteer to send them the stuff.
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That’s good to hear, although I’m sure some of the images and documents are critical to the posts. If we’re left only with scraps after the vandals with MBAs have pillaged the joint, I’ll take text over anything else.
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I agree that it is sad and awful that a lot of knowledge is just set to be lost, but isn’t better to abandon a stale platform for something better.
I remember when google code shut down, and the current environment with github looks much better.
On the other hand, when google reader was plugged off, the impact on RSS was more severe, and everything only got worse after it.
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Well this is a bummer. There’s a million esoteric interesting resources on Yahoo groups. Synthesizer people might want to join KnobTweak while they still can. (pardon the euphemistic title) Some very vital documents on Moogs there in the files section. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/KnobTweak/info
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I learned today that in the supremely functional world of privatized British telecoms that number ranges are assigned between providers using a yahoo group.
Post-contract with BT and other directly connected networks, number ranges need to be data-filled on other networks. This takes place via the Ofcom (or rather the Oftel) Yahoo Group. A review might consider whether it is befitting for the world’s sixth largest economy to manage critical national infrastructure via a Yahoo group but we would hope that is obvious. What we would like the review to consider is the process beyond posting that message. Many networks receive the Yahoo message, and very ably build the number range. Others do not and some pick and chose which ranges they enable. It is therefore something of a lottery, and what follows is an exhaustive process of testing and pleading. A review could consider how Ofcom could negate this needless and embarrassing process, and ensure fairness.
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What is needed are solutions for mass group archiving, archiving by thread, and archiving by poster, ideally to a transportable format so that group managers can land on a new platform without ending their archive.
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But everything that was hosted on Google Code is still available there. Google didn’t delete anything. They still haven’t, and it’s been at least 15 years now. Yahoo/Verizon/Oath is going to delete everything that was posted to Yahoo Groups in under 3 months, and there is no convenient “plug this into [service X] to migrate everything” feature like there was when Google Code shut down and suggested everybody just move to GitHub.
I guess there could be something to be said about moving away from stale platforms, but this is nothing even remotely like a move that was planned with preservation of anything whatsoever in mind.
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We’ll have to see how it sorts out, but it may even be planned with destruction in mind. Mass download of a group’s assets (even for backup) used to be prohibited by the terms of service, and I’d not be at all surprised if it still is. It’s more, “we don’t want you to rehost and give our competitors any shred of advantage, even though we’re abandoning your business, so bleep you.”
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groups.io has YG migration tools. From the description (free account/login required to view):
Have a Yahoo Group that you want to transfer to Groups.io? We’ve made the process easy. Please read all of the following, as some of it has changed.
What We Transfer
We can transfer members, archives (without attachments, however), photos, files, links and databases. Calendar entries are not copied at this time .
Premium Group Required
For the transfer, we ask that you sign up for the Premium Yearly plan (you can downgrade to free after a year if you wish).
Premium pricing is $10/month or $110/year. It does include API access, so it might be part of a path to migration to open data.
They are asking for all transfer requests to be in by December 1 given the imminent de-featuring of YG.
ETA:
There’s also a free Chrome App that downloads YG messages into mbox format. You do have to add in the Chrome Apps Launcher these days, but it was pretty painless once I got it going.
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yeah paying $110 in advance to transfer is going to be the death of a number of these.
I subscribe to about a dozen niche groups and in the past have tried to convince the “owners” that one day this was going to happen but they all refused to plan ahead and were quite happy with their “free” service. Now they are freaking out.
Good thing I opted to receive all the messages for the last decade to a dedicated Gmail account that I can search. They’ll never nuke that, right? oh well.
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And boingboing is forever, right?
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At least you can download every post you ever made on BB (at least since they switched to Discourse) to a CSV file relatively easily.
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what a bunch of motherfuckers
The internet has Alzheimer’s, and it’s caused by greed
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