Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo Groups
Yahoo Groups is shutting down after more than 18 years, and the Verizon-owned company is deleting all content from the site in mid-December.
"Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site," the company said in a notice to users. "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."
The notice links to one Yahoo webpage that provides instructions for downloading photos and files from groups that you belong to before the cutoff date, but the process sounds laborious, as it requires clicking on each photo or file you want to download. The shutdown notice also links to a page that provides instructions for requesting a download of all your Yahoo data. This page notes that "It can take up to 30 days for the request to finish processing and the download to become available."
Although the Yahoo Groups site will continue to exist after December 14, "all public groups will be made private or restricted," Yahoo said. Users will continue to "be able to communicate with your groups via email and search for private groups on the site," and admins will retain "limited access to group settings and administration tools," but that's it.
[...] In 2010, Yahoo said there were 115 million Yahoo Groups users and 10 million groups, eWeek reported at the time. Yahoo also boasted then that it had contracts with about 100 carriers and handset makers around the world to preinstall Yahoo apps on mobile devices.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday October 18 2019, @10:31AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @12:21PM (1 child)
Cloud users take note:
The problem with using Other People's Computer is that
it that if^H^H when their business plan changes, it ain't your computer.
There is a lot of useful stuff in those e-mail archives that will be lost in this.
Is there a way that wayback could fix it, or did Yahoo's original plan ofsucate things so that this too much trouble?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @02:28PM
At least, when THEIR business plan changes, losing a few files of our own will be the least of our problems.
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Friday October 18 2019, @01:28PM
-sigh-
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Friday October 18 2019, @02:39PM (2 children)
Yes, the summary says 115,000,000 users in 2010. I guess Myspace could've boasted similar numbers ten years ago as well. Especially after all the Yahoo mess in the last (IIRC) five-ish years. I'd have thought all those "users" would've started to, regarding the time frame, migrate in droves to that ongoing dumpster fire we call Facebook. Then again, not to throw politics into it, I predicted the American people had had enough of W in 2004. Shows what I know.
Seriously, who uses Yahoo Groups anymore? Is the soon-to-end current appeal the "exclusivity factor" like Usenet (totally unusable IMHO) or Myspace today, that apparently the kids with their rock 'n roll groups are still using (so they tell me)? Does anybody here still use Yahoo Groups?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @03:50AM
Yeah, there are a couple of special interest Yahoo Groups that I joined and still use from time to time. One of them has a lot of useful information (repair and mods to some older products). I'm hoping that someone has the time to archive it, somewhere.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday October 19 2019, @05:44AM
Yahoo groups, at least the way most of the people I know using it, is basically mailing lists, and yes I'm active on a couple, work fine in Thunderbird, just like Usenet, where the trolls and spammers have moved on. There's even a newsgroup that fuck beta users migrated to and is still happening (c.misc)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @02:40PM (2 children)
"Just to let you know, we are disabling services in a month, and if you want to download your shit we've disabled git access. You can download your source files individually. Have a nice day."
Free hosting is not free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @04:32PM
Good thing the underlying technology, git, was designed to be decentralized.
Anyone who has a copy has the entire repository and could become the new remote in a matter of minutes.
And if nobody had checked out the most recent changes, they probably weren't that important.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday October 19 2019, @05:47AM
It is happening with Bitbucket, at least for Mercurial repositories, though it is more like 6 months warning before they delete everything. Gotta love new owners.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @03:20PM (1 child)
Now someone do it with Facebook.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @10:13PM
Obama already did in 2012.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @03:54PM
According to Merriam-Webster [merriam-webster.com]:
Need I say more?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 18 2019, @04:49PM (2 children)
Don't put anything on the Internet you'll regret because it will last forever!! BS.
I think, long term, it is just the opposite. Where are all my usenet posts? Gone!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday October 18 2019, @06:26PM
No, just hard to find. But Google still has (most of) them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tizan on Friday October 18 2019, @08:06PM
You can tell wayback machine to archive some pages you wish to embarass people in the future with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @12:08AM
Yahoo! is! Deleting! All! Content! Ever! Posted! to! Yahoo! Groups!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @07:14AM
Does no one not understand how to archive and make available via a torrent? Or they just don't care?
I want my Geocities site back :(
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday October 19 2019, @07:27AM
I have not discerned anything useful yahoo has done for the last 20 years.
That there are 'executives' there making 100k+ a year there, still, when they are a brand that in every way signals 'cruft and nothing more' is beyond my capacity to fathom.
And they cant find a way to make money off of the earnest and well intentioned thoughts of millions of people over decades is indicative of their utter failure to be able to think. Even if it was a pay service, you can get a pdf print out of this or that group for 4.99, etc.
But I also forget, our current oligarchy doesn't allow 'executives' who have a sense of history or purpose beyond 6 months in either direction and who are selected for their ability to manage other people's ideas, not their own.
In this case they are more than happy to burn the equivalent of a million books from the dawn of the internet in order to save themselves effort.
I was watching avatar last night and it reminds me a little bit of when the special trees are bulldozed, 'the memory of our people' is in those bits.
Garbage people don't just make garbage, they destroy things of value as if they were garbage because they can't tell the difference.
thesesystemsarefailing.net