Yahoo Groups Is Shutting Down

[calliopes_pen]

Yahoo Groups is shutting down, and all content will be deleted. Based on my Yahoo e-mail address, I signed up in 2003, just so that I could (briefly; I was more of a lurker that wanted the digests) participate in a Julia/Barnabas Dark Shadows group. I was a member of so many groups for a while there, but most died or were taken over by spam. I had left most of them already over the years due to that. Buffy, Dark Shadows, Trek, Highlander...

By October 21st, new content cannot be posted. If there’s anything you want to save from however long ago that had been uploaded, you have until December 14th. After that date, it seems that “the Yahoo Groups site will continue to exist, however, all public groups will be made private or restricted. Admins will still be able to manage various group settings, though some functionality will be limited.”

Comments

[pat_t]

I closed down all the yahoo groups I managed years ago. It was already dead. So I gave everyone notice to grab anything from the groups they wanted before I closed them down

[marcelo]

That does bring back memories. Those were my first fandom haunts (well, after the character- or pairing-specific archives).

[graycardinal]

Erm. Almost all of those headlines are wrong or misleading. Which is not to say that Yahoo Groups isn't about to delete a slew of data on really short notice, but it is factually wrong to say that "Yahoo Groups is shutting down".

From what Yahoo itself has posted, Yahoo Groups will continue to exist, but they will exist exclusively as email lists, with no parallel Web storage or archive. I'm presently a member of half a dozen lists, and an owner of two, and for one of those two, a pure email list is perfectly adequate for our needs. (The other one of the two is dead, and I will close it down in December, although I will try to scrape the message archive first.)

There is one list I'm on that's still fairly sizeable, active, and possessed of a considerable Web archive in addition to the email traffic. That one is very properly scrambling for options (one suggestion has been to migrate here and/or to AO3). But for the smaller of the two lists where I'm an owner, I don't see a lot of other options for a small private email list that don't either charge the Earth, involve seriously intrusive advertising, or require fairly complex code-monkey skills to maintain.

[elistaire]

Yahoo Groups was essentially why I used yahoo email. Most of my groups are nothing much at the moment, but a few...*sigh* I suppose it is time to just get out of yahoo altogether.

[calliopes_pen]

I still prefer to use Yahoo for my e-mail, but if they ever nuke that I have a back-up Gmail account. All I would need to do is transfer a few e-mails I may wish to keep if I were given enough warning, and I'd be fine.