Why wouldn't these groups for which Yahoo seems to be a critical service have done this work weeks ago? Either it's important and you make an effort yourself, or you do nothing, which clearly indicates that it is not important. I'm having a hard time getting worked into a lather over this one like it seems everyone else is - it's been announced for 2 months - ample time to save what you needed.
Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
171–180 of 424 posts
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if we still had the Library of Alexandria, it may have shed zero light on the actual lives of citizens. Archiving content on the internet means capturing thousands of individual level perspectives and experiences. We don't know what will end up being important to historians 50 or 100 years from now. I would bet there are dozens if not hundreds of historians that would give anything for a record of their favorite…
What about people who don't want stupid comments they made online when they were 14 permanently indexed and searchable for all of time by the Archive Team? Yes, they may have posted to Yahoo! Groups back in 1999 when they didn't know better, but now it's 2019 and you have people digging up decades-old dirt on people to try and destroy their reputations and careers. Given that search engines have zero ethics when it c…
The archives are not easily indexable by search engines, they're posted as multi-GB gzip-compressed WARC files.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#173I don't see this as a big loss, and if I were someone who'd posted on Yahoo Groups, I'd be happy if it all disappeared. I don't consider this kind of content something that should be durable and everlasting. It's ephemeral conversation. If anything worth saving comes of conversation, it should be converted to another form and saved.
I'm glad I'm old enough that most of what I wrote on message boards as a teenager and young adult disappeared long before archive.org and similar sites existed. Conversations shouldn't last forever.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#174I'm genuinely curious from an ideological perspective, why archivists think all this material is worth saving? People often compare the shutting down of sites or the banning of content (e.g. When Tumblr banned porn, or now yahoo shutting down groups) to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. But there is a huge difference. The LoA held knowledge collated and collected by the best thinkers of the time. The Internet…
One man’s public toilet block graffiti wall is another’s Library of Alexandria. Let the historians and journalists decide what’s important and the archivists take their best crack at saving it.
I write a lot of historical content and often the most useful stuff I find—for example, old flyers or ads from the 1950s or 1960s—would have been considered trash by someone at the time.
So an archivist’s job isn’t to make a judgment. It’s to protect the data as they see fit.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#175What was the original plan exactly ? Subscribe to as many groups as possible and then wait until the last moment to grab the data ? That would almost certainly have resulted in massive bandwidth problems and massive bans by Verizon in response at this point, failing the archival effort anyway.
The archiving scripts have been under development and testing since Yahoo first made their announcement. The plan was to get as much manual labor (volunteers solving CAPTCHAs to join groups) done while waiting for the scripts to be stable, reliable, and automatable.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A phone company in the UK that assigns phone numbers using the groups and now will lose all those phone designations when it’s deleted. Wow, somebody invented a database that's even worse than an Excel file on a network share. (Also, how are they going to assign new numbers when archive.org takes over? Is archive.org going to give them write access?)
“My understanding is that [the group] will still function as a mailing list, which is for all practical purposes, what people use this as,” https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/17/20919630/yahoo-groups-uk...
Oh, neat, that's a pretty interesting read. Also good to know people will be able to keep their phone number after this.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#177I wonder if they're actually deleting it, or just making it inaccessible to the public?
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
That only explains a decision to take them down ITFP. What can be gained by shredding all that information? Maybe they aren't shredding it. Maybe they just want no publically available copies to exist.
It explains both. Blocking archiving will save a bunch of bandwidth as well as not having to scale up the servers for the load of dealing with the archiving.
I'll give you that. I wasn't thinking of a load spike, just that of the perpetually continued service.
But it doesn't excuse much. Capt. Obvious says, "it's temporary, it could have been anticipated, 'protecting' their datacenters from the load in exactly this way will almost certainly be interpreted as ill will, there are options not being taken such as throttling or even voluntarily sending it all to archive.org"
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#179I don't see this as a big loss, and if I were someone who'd posted on Yahoo Groups, I'd be happy if it all disappeared. I don't consider this kind of content something that should be durable and everlasting. It's ephemeral conversation. If anything worth saving comes of conversation, it should be converted to another form and saved. I'm glad I'm old enough that most of what I wrote on message boards as a teenager and…
I'm part of an opensource project that has been around for a long time, the mailing lists (for good or bad) lived there for quite some time. There is a lot of design and troubleshooting history I would rather not be lost forever.
Re: Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's way too much data. Many group owners did not know of the shutdown (Yahoo was negligent regarding informing owners), and even if they did many group owners have little or no technical capability. That's why so many requested of the Archive Team that their groups be archived.
1000 members of a group each downloading 20 messages every 4 hours (a dribble that wouldn't be noticed) can pull down ... 20k messages in 4 hours.
Is that enough? What about groups with only a few members? Or members that have passed away in the last 20 years? Will those WWII vet groups have 1000 responsive members with the technical skill to run an archive script in the next week?