Yahoo Groups (including one for H50) are closing down

[Mr. Mike]

Yahoo is closing down its groups soon and will soon remove them entirely. There are various announcements about this which you can read by doing a Google News search, like this:

Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site. Beginning October 28, you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed.

There was a H50 discussion group at Yahoo which started in 1998 and got very active around the time the new show started up. There were hundreds of postings per month (sort of like my own forum where there were so many postings around this time, I had to break up the archived files into 2 or 3 parts). I have attached a screen shot of the message posting history to this message.

The URL of this group is https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/H50FC/info, but that may not be of use, because it is a restricted group and access may be limited ... and will be even more limited shortly, because, from what I understand, you will not be able to join the group any more.

In the last 5 years, there have been hardly any posts in this Yahoo H50FC newsgroup. Most of them have been e-card greetings sent out on holidays from one particular member. I normally don't touch those because the links make me nervous.

There has suddenly been a "rising from the dead" interest in the group in the last few days because of the Yahoo announcement.
However, seeing messages in the group again has reminded me of something which used to drive me up the wall: the inability (or sheer laziness) of people to edit follow-up messages so we don't get the previous comments in a thread posted over and over in each reply.

These latest (and probably last) discussions there have also been full of HTML garbage which also makes me nervous, since the Internet has gotten a lot more dangerous since the group began.

[Bobbi]

Another group I belong to had an uptick in activity this week when this was announced.

If you're interested, you are able to download the content using this link: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/getmydata

However, when I tried it this morning, it's not working (figures). I don't know if it's because a bunch of people are requesting data or what.

[Mr. Mike]

I have done the above, though I dunno if "your data" (which you are supposedly downloading) just means the posts that you have made to the group, or the entire contents of the group from the beginning. They will send you a link to click on once this is done.

[Bobbi]

I'm curious about that too. I've asked for the information from a group I've been with for years and I'm interested to see what the link has in store.

[Mr. Mike]

I got the download from Yahoo Groups. You go to some link and click on it, and it offers a large ZIP file containing more ZIP files within. This contains (at least in the case of H50FC, the Five-O group) >every< single message from the beginning of the group (in 1998) to today.

Unfortunately, it also contains the headers for each message, which in addition to stuff you need to see like From, To, Date, and Subject, a lot of geeky garbage. I tried to import one of these files (there were half a dozen of them in the ZIP, because there was so much data) into my old e-mail program called Eudora. I was able to see all the subject lines in the "index" of the mailbox I had created, but the majority of the messages had no bodies (a few of them had one or two lines).

These files also contain a lot of what is called uuencoded text, which is how pictures are transmitted through e-mail (representing pictures which were uploaded to the group) and tons of inserted comments from where people were replying to posts and not removing previous stuff.

I don't know if there is an easy way that the actual messages can be extracted from all this. I am currently working on doing this for the forum which I had about a year, which is enough hassle!

[Bobbi]

Holy cow Mr. Mike, that sounds like a major pain!

I requested the download but when I got the link there was nothing there for me (I'm moderator on the Gatchman/Battle of the Planets mailing list) but our admin person is keeping us informed because she requested everything be transitioned to groups.io

I haven't experienced them yet but there are over 700 groups in front of us to transition over. I know it's not applicable to the Five-O group but our mailing list is still active, albeit slow (i.e. not a lot of traffic).

[Mr. Mike]

I just finished doing the Classic H50 postings from the phpBB forum which I hosted for about a year a couple of years ago. You can view these postings here:

http://fiveohomepage.com/phpBB-archived/Classic50/

While snooping around my hard drive, I also discovered (and had forgotten) that I had archived most of the IMDb forum for Kojak before that place closed down. I didn't bother with the H50 IMDb forum, because it had far too many postings in it. I doubt if I will convert the Kojak stuff into a readable form like the above, though ... doing the Classic H50 stuff just about drove me up the wall!