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End of Yahoo groups in sight?????


Merlin66

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Lots of features of Yahoo groups will cease on the 21st October 2019 including deleting attachments, message digests etc, etc.

See https://in.help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN3101...pressions=true


What are the options available to support a similar group??
I'm already aware of groups.IO (but at an annual cost to the owner of $110)

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Blimey.  That's a huge amount of content that's going to disappear.  I must be a member of quite a few.

Google Groups might be a possibility, assuming they're still running.  The only other alternative that springs to mind is tapatalk, but I find it really horrible, to the point where I've stopped using a group hosted there (it was taken over when they bought some other provider) altogether.

James

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The EQMOD group is also on Yahoo, isn't it?  Must be quite a few other astronomy groups, too.  Some  that I'm a member of have been going for twenty years or more.  If there's no way to transfer all that data out without going to a paid site such as groups.io that many people may not want to do, there's going to be so much information lost.

One assumes Yahoo have decided that what was once useful to host because it drove traffic to their site no longer has sufficient value to them :(

I have just found a Yahoo Groups scraper that can build a full local copy of an entire group, though it hasn't been updated for a couple of years.  I might have to give that a try on a couple of groups I'd like to keep information from.

James

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That is a shame.  There is some great content on some of those threads.  I am particularly partial to the TMB group which is sadly now defunct after the passing of Tom Back, but his designs still live on in the LZOS scopes so there is still good relevance in the information.

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This is sad from the content perspective but doesnt suprise me at all really. I signed up for a Yahoo account about 20 years ago when they were the search engine. But havent seen much innovation from them since.

When I see that a company uses Yahoo groups for support i always groan a little, I have to remember or setup a yahoo account just to log in to the group often, then jump through hoops to join. Forum software is much easier to use and navigate and usually with a much better feature set.

I can imagine those who use it frequently and are used to its layout/setup will miss it a lot though. Hopefully they will find a way to let group owners archive their content and import it into a different platform if they do close.

 

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10 hours ago, Merlin66 said:

Lots of features of Yahoo groups will cease on the 21st October 2019 including deleting attachments, message digests etc, etc.

See https://in.help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN3101...pressions=true


What are the options available to support a similar group??
I'm already aware of groups.IO (but at an annual cost to the owner of $110)

Facebook groups is getting very popular, there are many astro related  ones now...

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Personally I find Facebook groups chaotic, very hard to follow and I think the UI is awful.  I can see that it might be ok if you're on your phone checking things frequently or if information is being exchanged in a way where missing things isn't important, but when it comes to more in-depth/technical stuff, I find Facebook unusable.

James

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17 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Personally I find Facebook groups chaotic, very hard to follow and I think the UI is awful.  I can see that it might be ok if you're on your phone checking things frequently or if information is being exchanged in a way where missing things isn't important, but when it comes to more in-depth/technical stuff, I find Facebook unusable.

James

Yes, I tend to agree, but I do everything on an iPad Pro, so fine on that...I barely use my PC after buying this...find it superb 👍

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SGL has the 'clubs' feature now so if any of these astronomy related groups wanted to use SGL to host their content / discussions ongoing, please get in touch (contact@stargazerslounge.com) and we will see if we can help.

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47 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Personally I find Facebook groups chaotic, very hard to follow and I think the UI is awful.  I can see that it might be ok if you're on your phone checking things frequently or if information is being exchanged in a way where missing things isn't important, but when it comes to more in-depth/technical stuff, I find Facebook unusable.

James

Agreed, avoid it like the plague 😂

Dave

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On 17/10/2019 at 08:14, Merlin66 said:

Changing over to groups.IO now attract a ransom fee of $110/ year, they say this is the cost of procrastination.....change over prior to April 2019 would have been free......

Wow, I didn't realise they were now charging.  Luckily we migrated our local astronomical society's Yahoo group over to groups.io a couple of years ago. 

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Perhaps worth mentioning that ArchiveTeam (a fine bunch of data hoarders and collaborators with people like the Internet Archive) have a form to request archival of groups:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z-lODnyXsE2kiu8uL01L--10nDq3b_lowT88aB447-E/viewform?edit_requested=true

If you want something to persist, it's worth submitting it. https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page is their site if you're interested in learning more or helping out (if you've got enough internet spare - my gigabit symmetrical line does its part!).

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On 17/10/2019 at 00:38, JamesF said:

The EQMOD group is also on Yahoo, isn't it?

It was - we've now moved over to https://groups.io/g/EQMOD

New posts and memberships will no longer be accepted on the Yahoo Group.

We chose not to automatically transfer our member base as we did not think it appropriate to transfer personal details to a third party but folks are free to join the new group. In due course we plan to transfer over the yahoo messages archive and maybe files and photos. Whilst we want to preserve as much has possible but we believe it is important to first seek the consent (or at least implied consent) from the content owners  - to that end we are giving yahoo members the opportunity (until Nov 22) to delete any content that they do not wish to transferred (Mods will help with this if asked).

Chris.

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