Written by The Old Friends team at Trade Me in General at 5:30pm, Mon 9 Nov 2015

Today we announced that oldfriends.co.nz will be closing in a couple of months.

Why are you closing down Old Friends?

We’re always working hard to improve the experience for our members and we’ve struggled to give Old Friends sufficient oxygen recently, given the bigger opportunities in the core areas of our business. Because of this, we think the time is right to pull down the shutters. We understand this might not be the best news for our members who use Old Friends regularly and this isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly.

From early to mid-January, the Old Friends site will be closed down and no longer accessible. Any data will also be deleted.

If you have any information on Old Friends that you'd like to keep (e.g. messages or photos), please make sure to save this as soon as possible. To save a photo, right click on it and select 'Save image as'. If you've forgotten your password, head over to the Old Friends help page to reset it.

Why are you deleting the data?

Under the Privacy Act, we’re unable to keep or use Old Friends members’ personal information after we stop providing Old Friends services.

When members signed up to Old Friends, this gave us permission to use this data for the purpose of providing Old Friends services. As Old Friends is closing and we’ll no longer be providing these services, Trade Me is not able to retain the data, as we don’t have consent to use it for any other purpose.

The good news is that we’ve been in touch with the National Library team who run a ‘web harvest’ initiative. This will include archiving publicly available information that is part of Old Friends. That information will remain available even after Old Friends closes early next year.

If you’ve got any other questions or concerns please drop us a line.

This site announcement was updated on 13 November.