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:( Read more... )


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.

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?