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?