Verizon reportedly blocks archivists from Yahoo Groups days before deletion
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
As a historian and librarian, losing this would be horrible for my colleagues in the future. A digital dark age.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
Tell me again why these companies are to be considered "Trusted" but we're not?
Here is a real acid test for ya: If one of these companies decides to (without solicitation) load your e-mail box with child porn or other illegal material "out of spite", who is going to prison?
Upvote
0
(1
/
-1)
Oath point blank rejected those offers.
In defence of Oath, nobody that knew anything about the underlying software used by Groups, was employed by Oath, or its affiliates or its contractors, when those offers were made.
OTOH, neither Oath, nor its affiliates, nor its contractors had anybody assigned to Groups, at that time.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Depends on the group, quite a few have a large files section where photos and diagrams are posted. AFAIK all the groups I belong to have moved to io.groups.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
OTOH there are prolly lotsa pics that were taken long ago that users are happy to see gone from the internet forever. Maybe they don't want them preserved?
Upvote
-8
(0
/
-8)
At one time, I was on about 40+ groups, but that number lessened considerably over the years. And when Oaf started to ignore the well-being of the groups, many of the ones I belonged to went to groups io. They had a transfer process that took everything the group had in Yahoo and transferred it to groups io. Some had lots of images, and one group in particular most of the image files were 'how tos' by modelers and craftsmen. That's the stuff you want to archive somewhere; somebody spent months crafting something and documenting the process and now Oaf wants to dump it all. And I know one group I belong to has 5-6 gigs of images.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
PSA:
You can help the archiving process by creating accounts and joining groups. The team needs as many hands on as possible because CAPTCHAS need to be solved because Verizon is banning accounts
Here are all of the details: https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-joiner
You can help the archiving process by creating accounts and joining groups. The team needs as many hands on as possible because CAPTCHAS need to be solved because Verizon is banning accounts
Here are all of the details: https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-joiner
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
seriously... and couldn't Verizon save all those precious resources just by archiving the groups themselves and sending the database to the archivists? maybe a dumb question, but seems like a few 8tb drives should be able to hold it, yeah? then there's no strain on verizon's bandwidth or servers which have to do all the lookups etc...
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
still, how much space? 1000tb? that's like $20,000 worth of (consumer-quality) hard drives, peanuts for a company like verizon
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
You people are whining because Verizon wanted to shutdown groups no one is maintaining and lock out people from archiving the groups, people that had nothing to do with the groups to begin with. Fucking Christ.
Next time you delete something from your computer, be sure and send it to the archivers first. Fucking children.
Next time you delete something from your computer, be sure and send it to the archivers first. Fucking children.
Upvote
-17
(0
/
-17)
Maybe having a python selenium script that ordinary users can use to automate the download process using their browser, then automatically package and upload to the archive?
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
I wanted to upvote you, but you said downvote. Crap, now I said it too...
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Careful, we might get into a downvote loop and crash Condé Nast's servers.
Upvote
0
(1
/
-1)
It's the few bucks they pay the intern to unban the few archivers that is too costly.
If it will all be gone in a few days, why ban anyway anymore?
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
They're not doing it out of spite. They still make money shoveling ads at Yahoogroups users.
If they were just shutting it down, I could believe the "cost" excuse. But their insistence on blocking archiving points to some financial incentive beyond that, such as, oh, some enormous "social media" site paying VZ to shut it down in order to drive more traffic to their servers.
On the flip side, almost everything connected with Yahoo has, sooner or later, been infected with industrial-grade stupid, so who knows...
If they were just shutting it down, I could believe the "cost" excuse. But their insistence on blocking archiving points to some financial incentive beyond that, such as, oh, some enormous "social media" site paying VZ to shut it down in order to drive more traffic to their servers.
On the flip side, almost everything connected with Yahoo has, sooner or later, been infected with industrial-grade stupid, so who knows...
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
A couple of weeks ago I ran a script I wrote myself that triggers the Internet Archive to archive pages on an old Yahoo group I belonged to, and that worked ok. (The Internet Archive itself imposes a ban if you do it too quickly, so I had the script ask for one page every few seconds and ran it for hours.)
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
If you have an account in a private group that hasn't been migrated or archived already, please archive it using the yahoo-group-archiver on the IgnoredAmbience github page.
This isn't just nostalgia we're losing; there's a ton of technical/academic information that was exchanged on these groups and will be lost forever.
This isn't just nostalgia we're losing; there's a ton of technical/academic information that was exchanged on these groups and will be lost forever.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
Yes. It's full of little gems that are now going to have to be painstakingly rebuilt. Such as the proa_file group, which contained.... oh, nothing much, just nearly the sum total of all historical and engineering knowledge about the class of watercraft that made it possible for ancient human civilization to spread across the Pacific.
These days, I'm almost afraid to use hyperlinks to other sites when I write articles, for fear that LinkChecker will overwhelm my inbox with "this news article you cited as a reference three months ago got erased by its publisher with no redirect" a thousand times a day.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)
Mmmm...I don't believe in my entire life I've ever visited a Yahoo group. I don't know how I do it, but somehow I find the knowledge I need to do the stuff I want to do. Perhaps because all knowledge isn't trapped in an unused Yahoo group? Holy shit you don't say.
Upvote
-9
(0
/
-9)
In their defense, that was back when Yahoo owned a huge chunk of Alibaba, and the tattered remains of Yahoo recently sold that off for something in the $40 billion range. So, if you think about it as Microsoft trying to buy a 30% stake in Alibaba with Yahoo thrown in for free, then the Yahoo board's refusal to sell makes a whole lot more sense. Still not sure I would have voted that way if I were on the Yahoo board, but it's at least within shouting distance of a rational decision.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
Ah yes, because you don't think you'll find it useful, it should simply be discarded. We are so fortunate to hear your decrees.
I see the point in archiving is utterly lost on you.
Upvote
7
(8
/
-1)
OK, but that's not what this article is about. It's about the fact that Yahoo Groups house a lot of archives of various information that should be preserved for future research and use.
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
"You people are whining because this newspaper went out of business and you people who had nothing to do with the newspaper to begin with want to save its archives." -- an ignorant fuck just like you at some point in history, probably.
Upvote
2
(3
/
-1)
That would be way more charitable than would ever be reasonable.
There are two main problems with that. First is that Glacier has access times (time from request to actually getting it) counted in hours, making it utterly impractical to have anything drawing from it that is meant for direct consumption. Second one is that they would need to somehow replicate the database backend for the forum in an object storage format.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
Hrm, groups.yahoo.com isn't working well even for live viewing today. Early this morning I was able to still connect to it fairly reliably, but now I'm often getting
It could be from an overload of people trying to access it today.
Late last night I was still able to save a few pages to archive.org, but since this morning, web.archive.org's built in instant save functionality seems to have fully stopped being able to archive further Yahoo groups pages. Verizon is either blocking the IPs of archive.org's machines, or the responses (when they work at all) are so slow due to high access volume that the requests are timing out.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Whilst Yahoo hasn't banned me, it has prevented me from downloading anything.
At least Google gave a rational for not letting me download my digital content. (Google thinks there is too much suspicious activity on the account. )
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
does the appended number mean these are broken up (like a multipart ZIP or UUencode file) and you need to merge them before you have a valid MBOX file?
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Archives are full of unique or nearly-unique items, and often their value is not clear at the time of archiving. Libraries are generally populated with items that were specifically selected for their value (in a cultural, informational, educational, or entertainment sense, not usually particularly financially valuable), but are rarely unique (though, over time, they may end up with the last accessible, or even last, copy of something).
I think the accusation here is that a librarian is less likely to see the value in archiving vast swaths of Yahoo Groups communications than an archivist would, due to their differing training and the resultant mindsets.
I'm not sure that's true. While the tools they use are very different, and the collections are very different, the training on non-technical matters is very similar, even identical. Ideologies about the importance of preserving and accessing info are shared between the two professions, and lots of archivists go to a library school to get their degree.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)