
Verizon extends deadline for Yahoo Groups shutdown to January 31, 2020 - jonah-archive
https://www.fastcompany.com/90441669/verizon-says-archiving-yahoo-groups-would-strain-its-resources-the-reality-is-much-sadder
======
jonah-archive
Hi all, Archive Team is still working on backing up as much of Yahoo Groups as
they're able to, as discussed in this previous post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21737696)

Info about the archival process:
[https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups)

Details about downloading groups you're a member of:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qNCAgMN-Q9koFK1EzEFek2k4...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qNCAgMN-Q9koFK1EzEFek2k4iFNLeHo03blIk20-H7s/edit)

Tooling to do this from the CLI: [https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/yahoo-group-
archiver](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/yahoo-group-archiver)

If you want to help the effort, run yahoogroups-joiner to help the Archive
Team join as many public groups as possible:
[https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-
joiner](https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-joiner)

Run the Archive Team Warrior if you have available compute/storage:
[https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior](https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior)

(Disclaimer: I don't work directly with Archive Team, but I work for the
Internet Archive, which is where most of this data will end up living
hopefully forever. We're also in the midst of our annual fund drive --
[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/) if you're able and
interested in helping out monetarily.)

------
teovall
The title of this post is very misleading. Verizon has made no change to the
schedule of the shutdown other than allowing more time for end-users to
request a partial download of data that they've posted. These downloads are
incomplete and do not contain much of the metadata required to be useful for
archiving.

Verizon are giving a tiny, meaningless concession to change the narrative and
make everything seem fine now, but it is not. A vast trove of important
historical information will become inaccessible and essentially lost forever
in less than four days.

Verizon provides no way for anyone to download a complete, archival quality
copy of groups. The only method currently available is by using the third
party software that Verizon is attempting to block and this method will become
completely unavailable after the 14th.

~~~
jonah-archive
Sorry, I was trying to get the date/etc into the field. Maybe someone can
suggest a better title.

Given that this was just announced, we don't really know what's going to
happen, but it does seem like they're going to disable access on the 14th as
expected, and provide their broken tool for downloads after that (until the
latter deadline). All the more reason to download as much as we can as quickly
as we can, and continue putting pressure on Verizon.

