[Will be sent out to media. Thanks to those who are commenting here for useful bits of information that has been included.]
Verizon Media/Yahoo closing down Yahoo Groups, with imminent loss of important history.
Yahoo, now owned by Verizon, is in the process of partially closing down a two-decades long service, Yahoo Groups. This email list-serve/bulletin board is both a discussion platform and a repository of history for a large array of communities. Verizon intends to make all such history unavailable after December 14th of this year, having provided less than 2 and a half months of warning and, due to a broken system, having failed to alert numerous group owners and members.
Some of the histories on this platform are important, not just to the early Internet, but even to academic research and scientific investigations. Examples are discussion groups that included WW-II veterans, many of whom are now deceased; queer and trans groups, some of whom have organized to try to preserve this history [1,2]; and minority/immigrant groups [3]. Those with scientific data include earthquake researchers, medical/biohacking groups, bird watchers with decades of data, and even material relevant to patent claims. Popular culture groups devoted to art have uploaded their works there, and fan-fiction groups exchanged stories and feedback [4]. Sadly, Verizon has not made arrangements to help people to preserve this material. This has resulted in individual Yahoo Group owners/moderators, most of whom do not have technical backgrounds, scrambling to find ways to download their archives. Yahoo claims they have provided a data exporter, but it is very incomplete. Groups include not only messages, but files, databases, calendars and other materials. Some more technical users have organized to take requests, crowd-sourcing the work to download these Groups. One such [4] has been in contact with the Internet Archive, with the objective of uploading whatever they can get to Archive.org. Unfortunately, for reasons we can't guess, Verizon has been actively obstructing these efforts [5]. We urgently request that if Verizon will not support efforts to preserve this material, then they at least allow some means that Group owners can download complete archives of their groups, and independent groups can download public Groups. For this, we also need more time.
Support can be offered by spreading the word on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, and other social media.
Verizon can be contacted at:
"Hans Vestberg, Chariman & CEO"
"Guru Gowrappan, Executive VP & group CEO, Verizon Media"
"Ronan Dunne, Executive VP & group CEO, Verizon Consumer"
"Tami Erwin, Executive VP & group CEO, Verizon Business"
Please contact the following people for further information:
[For people here, just go to IRC as described in the link of the OP.]
[1] Queer Digital History Project: https://queerdigital.com/ygpresproject
[2] Project to Archive Trans Yahoo Groups: https://archivetransyahoo.noblogs.org/list-of-known-trans-gr...
[3] Project to Archive South Asian American yahoo groups: https://yahoogroups.southasianamerican.org/
[4] Archive Team archiving Fandom but also taking requests from group owners: https://archiveteam.org/
[5] Exchanges with Yahoo: https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/verizon-...