The end of Yahoo! groups (updated 2019-10-27)

[shadowscast]

Literally less than a month ago, I posted a retrospective of my fannish history and mentioned that I'm still the list owner of the Once A Thief slash-discussion mailing list I first joined as a new-fledged fan in 2001. yourlibrarian and I had a discussion in the comments about how amazing it was that the Yahoo! group still existed, and about how its days might be numbered now that Verizon has Yahoo.

So, yup. Today yourlibrarian pointed me at an announcement: Yahoo! groups will be shutting down most of their functionality very soon. Some stuff happens on October 21st (which is in 5 days, gah!) and most of the shutdown will be on December 14th. I think that the message archives will remain available until December 14th. Here's Yahoo's announcement.

So now I'm trying to figure out:

a) Is there a way I can save the message archive?
b) If so, what should I do with it afterwards?

Regarding part (a):

I've been googling about this periodically since I found out about it mid-afternoon. I found an article on Vice, a reddit thread, and an article on The Verge. So far everybody seems to be kind of shocked and scrambling.

I'm not super tech-savvy. I don't know how to run a Python script. (It's something I could probably learn, but how long would it take me? I don't know in advance! I want to save the message archive but I only have so much spare time.) I'm hoping that a user-friendly way to download the complete message archive in a usable form will show up somewhere I can find it before it's too late. (Update 2019-10-17: It did! I used PG Offline to download the whole message archive a few minutes ago, and it was very easy.)

Earlier this evening I followed Yahoo!'s rather confusing instructions and managed to "request download of my data"—but it's not at all clear to me what that will get me, or when. (Right now I have a 3-hours-old email from Yahoo! saying: "You requested a download of your Yahoo Groups data for [username]. We will notify you at [email address] when your download is ready." Which leaves me to wonder: if the download takes more than three hours to prepare, are they doing it manually???) (Update 2019-10-27: I finally did receive the data. I describe the results in this entry.)

rahirah posted about this issue a few hours ago: Yahoo Groups is going away. They included a link to a download tool; I haven't looked at that one yet, but I will.

UPDATE: rahirah tells me that the download tool worked! So I'll look into that.

Regarding part (b):

Yeah, so, assuming I can successfully rescue the archived messages ... what on earth do I do with them?

Comments

[avrelia]

ouch :(

I've never participated in yahoo groups, but I feel your pain. There are a lot of spaces where I spent a lot of time and talked to great people online. I know it all can disappear any time... I have most of what I write saved, but all the conversations are out there...

good luck with archiving!

[yourlibrarian]

If it's only conversation, I'm not sure. But if it includes fanworks, they can be added to AO3 in their own collection.

[shadowscast]

There's both conversation and fanworks.

The fanworks are nearly all archived at The Agency. The RatBoat mailing list always carried the notice in its intro file: All fic posted here will be archived at The Agency unless the author requests otherwise.

In practice, the last time anything was uploaded to The Agency was on July 31st, 2005. However very little fic was posted to the list after that date (and most of it was mine, LOL!). In fact, when I finished writing Family in 2010, I emailed the archivist to ask them to put the complete version up at the Agency (Parts I-IV are there, from 2003), and I never heard back.

Some of the authors who posted fic to the RatBoat mailing list have (like me) uploaded their own fic to AO3 in the intervening years. Many of them haven't, but of those who haven't, most stories are archived at The Agency. Only a few stories (but a non-zero number) exist in the RatBoat message archives but not at either AO3 or The Agency.

[yourlibrarian]

Hmm, and it sounds like The Agency owner has disappeared. Given the tiny size of the fandom it would still be worth it though to find the ones in the group not already at AO3 (regardless of whether they're at the Agency) and get those up there though. You only need to be the list/archive owner to get Open Doors to help, although if it's only 50 or so works overall that aren't already on AO3 you could probably do it yourself. You can start a collection there, link the ones already at AO3 into it, and then add the rest.