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Yahoo groups going bye bye


acadiel

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Yahoo launched Groups in 2001 as a sort of forum and mailing list hybrid, and it quickly became a home for specialist communities.

 

"Accidental" revisionist history completely ignoring that Yahoo! Groups was the result of Yahoo!'s acquisition of eGroups.  Not to mention it functioned a helluva lot better as eGroups.

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13 hours ago, acadiel said:

We should put the archive that someone made in the links thread.  Also maybe think of contingency plans for exporting AA someone too one day just in case.

Speaking of, are there any existing mirrors of said archive?  I have space.

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A couple years ago, Yahoo split their webservices off into another company, and the quality went WAY low.

 

When my wordpress blog started completely failing to update, I contacted their customer support and they basically said it was unsupported. I jumped ship and moved to AWS, where I'm spending roughly the same amount of money and I have complete control over my server.

 

Oh, and they cheated me too. I moved my domain to AWS, and they refused to refund the year's payment OR give me access to the webspace because the domain was gone.

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14 hours ago, RXB said:

Will not miss the gobs of junk mail I got from it filling up my junk email filter.

Ironically, I keep a Yahoo mail account explicitly for all those sites that demand an email for nebulously defined reasons, exclusively so it can service as a trash bin for all that unsolicited email. :P

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19 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Speaking of, are there any existing mirrors of said archive?  I have space.

Yes and no.  Last year, I dumped all the messages and them "processed" them so the individual message archives were still readable and searchable in a message forum on my BBS.  I did this for the Geneve group as well.  My BBS is telnet accessible at 9640news.ddns.net:9640 or  you can go in through the web interface at http://9640news.ddns.net:8080

 

Beery

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  • 3 weeks later...

From Yahoo today:


Dear Group Moderators and Members,

Thank you for your commitment to Yahoo and for helping us define the power of digital communities. Eighteen years ago, we combined the functionality of a site called eGroups.com with a precursor community platform called Yahoo Clubs to launch Yahoo Groups. Since then, you and millions of others have helped prove our hypothesis, by creating and joining more than 10 Million groups.

A lot has changed about the Internet since 2001, including the ways most people now use Yahoo Groups. Today, most Yahoo Groups activity happens in your email inbox, not on the bulletin boards where Yahoo Groups started in the pre-smartphone age. Increasingly, people want content and connections coming directly to them, and this is why we continue to invest in Yahoo Mail -- including the recent launch of a new Yahoo Mail app that is currently the highest-rated email app in the App Store and Google Play.

So, as our users’ habits have evolved, we have begun the process of evolving our approach to help active Yahoo Groups thrive and migrate to our email platform. To help you plan for these changes, below is the schedule of how this transition will happen.

Beginning October 28, 2019:
Users will be able to join a Yahoo Group only through an invite from the Group Moderator or by submitting a request to join a Group, which requires approval by the Group Moderator.
Since we are moving Group communication from posting on message boards to email distribution, uploading and hosting of new content will also be disabled on the Yahoo Groups website.

Beginning December 14, 2019:
All Groups will be made private and any content that was previously uploaded via the website will be removed. We believe privacy is critical and made this decision to better align with our overall principles.
If you would like to keep any of the content you’ve posted or stored in the past within your Yahoo Group, please download it by December 14 by accessing this link.

As these dates get closer, we will send follow-up reminders. More information about the upcoming changes can be found here.

While this evolution of Yahoo Groups is inspired by how we see the platform being used today, we know change can be difficult. Here are a few important facts as we make this transition:

1. Yahoo Groups is not going away - We know that our users are deeply passionate about connecting around shared interests, and we are evolving Groups to better align with how you use it today.

2. New groups can still be formed - Users can continue to connect with others around their common bonds and interests. From animal rescues to sporting and activity groups, civic organizations to local PTAs, members of our Yahoo Groups will remain connected and able to share their activities and interests. All of the content that you have shared previously on the website, can continue to be shared via email.

We know that Yahoo Groups is an important online extension of your real-life group of friends, interests and communities, and we are committed to supporting communities that rely on Yahoo Groups. Thanks for coming along with us this far. We look forward to seeing where the technology -- and you -- take us in the decades to come.

Sincerely,
The Groups Team

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So it will basically be reduced to a mailing list.  One of the things I liked about the original yahoo groups was the ability to read new posts directly from the group site in the order they were posted, numbered.  Some users subscribed to an email digest or even opted to get individual emails sent to them.  I never did that as my email box is cluttered enough already.

 

This decision by yahoo fits with the times, I suppose.  Remove what little practical functionality existed and retain the least desirable (to me anyway) parts of the service.  It's still worth what we pay for it though, free.

 

Yahoo web mail allows for sorting incoming messages into folders.  Directing an email digest into a specific folder is probably what I will be doing.  It shouldn't be a lot of incoming mail anymore.  Yahoo groups activity isn't what it once was.

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The sad thing with YahooGroups, is that as Facebook gained more and more popularity, YahooGroups died.  Back in the day, there were times where there were over 1300 posts in a single month.  Now, the average is about 1 post per week, and many of those posts that give that average are only due to the discussion of YahooGroups disappearing.

 

Myself, I occasionally catch some traffic on Facebook, but it is here on AtariAge where I capture the traffic for the TI-99/4A and Geneve.  That has only come about in the last 2 years.  At the Chicago Fair, I spoke to a number of people that were only vaguely aware there was much of any traffic happening here.

 

Myself though, I do not read all the message threads as they do not interest me.  However, if the messages were posted in numerical format, I would be reading them all.  I'm just not going to make the effort to click and scroll down to the newest messages in a thread on a desktop web interface.  Seems as though my iPad will at least give me the new messages at the top, but not on the desktop client (Chrome).

 

Beery

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, BeeryMiller said:

The sad thing with YahooGroups, is that as Facebook gained more and more popularity, YahooGroups died.  Back in the day, there were times where there were over 1300 posts in a single month.  Now, the average is about 1 post per week, and many of those posts that give that average are only due to the discussion of YahooGroups disappearing.

 

Myself, I occasionally catch some traffic on Facebook, but it is here on AtariAge where I capture the traffic for the TI-99/4A and Geneve.  That has only come about in the last 2 years.  At the Chicago Fair, I spoke to a number of people that were only vaguely aware there was much of any traffic happening here.

 

Myself though, I do not read all the message threads as they do not interest me.  However, if the messages were posted in numerical format, I would be reading them all.  I'm just not going to make the effort to click and scroll down to the newest messages in a thread on a desktop web interface.  Seems as though my iPad will at least give me the new messages at the top, but not on the desktop client (Chrome).

 

Beery

 

 

 

I stopped visiting the Yahoo group years ago after I discovered AtariAge. Part of it is I've always preferred a forum style, but also because the culture at AA was just MUCH better.

 

The TI Yahoo group always felt far too insular. There was almost no interest in games or people working on games, you got at best a polite "Oh nice" most of the time. And shortly after I signed on I got attacked by one member for daring to bring up a Commodore 64 in context to graphics. He eventually got kicked out of the group for his verbal abuse.

 

Retro-computing is a shared hobby and passion of many people, and these days, to me, the computer you love is irrelevant. The days of a closed group should be over.

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Not sure why some in the TI community stubbornly continue to shun AA. It's by far the best forum available for file sharing, discussions etc... Facebook is great for show and tell, but it's damn hard to follow a topic there without going through all the daily chatter and file sharing is primitive at best. It would really benefit all of us if we had a unified forum instead of trying to hunt down information across multiple platforms. And now I have an email from arcadeshopper about setting up a TI group on groupsIO, which is not free by the way. Why???

Rant over.

 

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What irritated me is that this morning I got an email from yahoo about the groups.

 

I haven't used any Yahoo product in over a decade. I haven't used flickr in forever, but I still keep getting emails about them. There's no way to unsubscribe. 

 

Wasn't there also like Yahoo Clubs or something? I swore it was ran off of a 300 baud modem.

 

Yahoo = Hooli. 

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8 minutes ago, Vorticon said:

Not sure why some in the TI community stubbornly continue to shun AA. It's by far the best forum available for file sharing, discussions etc... Facebook is great for show and tell, but it's damn hard to follow a topic there without going through all the daily chatter and file sharing is primitive at best. It would really benefit all of us if we had a unified forum instead of trying to hunt down information across multiple platforms. And now I have an email from arcadeshopper about setting up a TI group on groupsIO, which is not free by the way. Why???

Rant over.

 

Completely agree.  Why even migrate it?  It’s dead.  Nobody goes there.  Any why pick the paid version of groups.io when there’s a free version?  Nobody’s going to be on the list because the community is here.

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1 hour ago, Vorticon said:

Not sure why some in the TI community stubbornly continue to shun AA. It's by far the best forum available for file sharing, discussions etc...

I've used other sites, and they never seemed to 'catch on', after days or weeks of inactivity, I simply got tired of wasting my time logging in to check those places hoping that 'today would be different'.  There is already a lot of activity on AtariAge, online search engines always seem to hit on AtariAge.  Our little forum here has become a magnet for TI users.  AtariAge also has some useful features that I rely on.  I'm comfortable here, so here I'll stay without further time wasting diversions that would probably only duplicate what we have here to a small extent.

 

The grass is already green and growing on this side of the fence, I have no interest in plowing another field, planting and hoping to see if anything will grow.

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Please understand I am not advocating migrating the platform over to groups.io, however I will say, there are a few TI'ers as evidence I saw and heard at the Chicago Fair, that enjoy getting posts via an email client, and are much less likely to browse messages on a web interface.  If they do, then it is one every month or three.  At that point, AtariAge has had so much traffic, they can be easily overwhelmed by all the new topic areas, etc.

 

Keep in mind there are some "older" TI'ers that are not as well versed on using anything complicated like a web browser and getting onto web pages is a challenge.  However, give them an iPad or a mobile phone, they can read emails without much effort.  These people are generally not posting, but reading the current news.

 

If AtariAge could have been configured to send new posts out as a mailing list, it would capture many of those people.  Between spammers and just the huge server traffic that would entail, I understand why that would not even be considered.

 

Beery

 

 

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Did you know one can "follow" a specific thread(s) and get those messages via an email?  If one decided to reply, all they would have to do is just click a button in the email to reply, they would then be taken directly to that message on AA where they would reply and be done with it.  They would choose how little or much they wanted to 'follow'.

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9 hours ago, BeeryMiller said:

Please understand I am not advocating migrating the platform over to groups.io, however I will say, there are a few TI'ers as evidence I saw and heard at the Chicago Fair, that enjoy getting posts via an email client, and are much less likely to browse messages on a web interface.  If they do, then it is one every month or three.  At that point, AtariAge has had so much traffic, they can be easily overwhelmed by all the new topic areas, etc.

 

But the problem is that if there's no new content on Yahoo... what is there to browse?  No matter what the preference is, the reality is that almost 99% of the content is here for development/engineering/etc.  There's a small amount of content on Facebook, which is the second "largest" site.  

 

To me, it's wasting time and effort... if someone wants to do so, they can, but unless some mass exodus provides a reason for the community to leave its home here, I don't see a move to a new community happening.

 

Our Atlanta Historic Computing Society moved off of Yahoo Groups to the free Groups.io (which IMHO does everything needed) - but we were going from Yahoo to somewhere else and didn't have an already active community on a place like Atari Age.

 

 

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