shadowscast

First of all,

morgandawn's post seems to be emerging as a central organizing/info point, so I'll link to it again: Yahoo Groups Shutting Down - Dec 14, 2019 (UPDATED)

As you'll recall, my particular urgent interest in this is that I'm the list admin for a fannish Yahoo group. The list hasn't been active for a very long time, but I'd hate to see its history disappear.

So here's what I've done so far:

1) I've downloaded all the messages, files, and photos for the fannish group for which I am the admin. I used PG Offline. I subsequently exported the message data in all of the formats which the program offered. I also discovered that I could open the .db3 file with SQLiteStudio, a free and open-source program. So I am satisfied that the data is now safe (on my hard drive at least).

2) I've reached out to the Open Doors project. I've been in communication with a volunteer. In a message they sent me a few hours ago, they mentioned "We are also working on a news post with more information which we hope will be posted within the next day or two." So that's good to know, and I'll watch for that.

3) I made a user account at Fanlore, and created a page for the group: RatBoat. It was pretty easy, actually!

In a way it was surprising that the page didn't already exist, since a lot of related entities did already have pages. The founders of the list had a page, the fanzines the list was originally created to talk about had a page, the archive that all fics posted to the list were archived to had a page—but the list did not have a page! Well, now it does.

I wasn't able to footnote anything, since the info I entered was all based on the messages from the list, which are not linkable. The fact that I coincidentally re-read the entire message log in a fit of nostalgia literally three weeks ago was helpful, though!

4) I made a DreamWidth community for the fandom:

once_a_thief. I mean, why not? Sure the mailing list has been dead for many years, but I figured I should at least make a place where people could go, if they wanted to.

5) I sent a message to the mailing list itself, to let any members who are still receiving messages know what's going on.

Text of my message, for the record:

Subject: Preserving RatBoat's history

Hello out there, anyone who's still receiving these messages!

Depending on how involved you currently are in online fandom, you may already be aware that two days ago, Yahoo announced that it will be discontinuing a lot of the functionality of Yahoo groups as of December 14th, as well as deleting associated files.

Here's a link to the official announcement from Yahoo:
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/SLN31010.html?impressions=tru

As you can probably imagine, ours is not the only fannish group which stands to have its history deleted from the internet. A lot of fannish participation happened through Yahoo groups back in the early 2000's.

Fanlore, a project of the Organization for Transformative works interested in preserving fannish history, has made a post about this topic:

Tumbler link: https://otw-fanlore.tumblr.com/post/188414139744/psa-yahoo-groups

DreamWidth link: https://fanlore.dreamwidth.org/93917.html

They're encouraging everyone who can to help archive fannish groups' histories before they disappear.

As the current administrator of this list (a role I've had since March of 2003, if you can believe it!), I have taken the initiative to download the files and message history associated with this group, so that they won't be lost when Yahoo deletes them.

I'm still trying to figure out what to do with them, in terms of archiving them; right how they're all just on my hard drive. Suggestions from the community are welcome! (You can still post to this mailing list by replying to this message!)

If you'd like to keep a copy on your hard drive too, so that you can enjoy browsing through the message logs and reliving the 2001-2003 heyday of this fandom, I encourage you to do so! Any member of the group can download the files and message archive. There are instructions linked here:

https://morgandawn.dreamwidth.org/1678027.html

This list hasn't been active in over a decade, but if this message hits you in the you-don't-know-what-you've-got-till-its-gone feels, and you suddenly have the urge to talk about this gloriously weird, remarkably slashy show, there is still a Once A Thief community over on LiveJournal: https://once-a-thief.livejournal.com/

And since a lot of fannish activity has moved over to DreamWidth these days, I've just created a DreamWidth Once A Thief community: https://once-a-thief.dreamwidth.org/

(Full disclosure: DreamWidth is my preferred place for fannish engagement these days.)

It would be great if we could have a little reunion there, and talk about the old days! :-D

And that's about all that I can think of to do, for now! There's still very much the question of what I should/can do with the whole archive, but I think that I'm going to wait quietly for a bit and see what emerges in terms of community standards for archiving. There's the question of the fic, and of the conversation logs, and there are some image files, too.