Update November 2, 2019: /r/datahoarders has launched a dedicated thread for volunteers who want to save Yahoo Groups content: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/dqoa9u/help_us_save_as_many_yahoo_groups_as_possible/

As you may have heard by now, Yahoo Groups is deleting lots of content. It’s not shutting down, you understand, it’s just restricting all ability to upload content as of October 28, and deleting all existing content as of December 14. The Yahoo announcement about this notes: “The Yahoo Groups site will continue to exist, however, all public groups will be made private or restricted. Any new group members will need to request an invite or be invited by an admin. Admins will still be able to manage various group settings, though some functionality will be limited.”

Why Yahoo doesn’t just cleanly shut it down instead of turning Yahoo Groups into this plausible-deniability-for-corporate-responsibility Frankenstein is beyond me. But beyond that, my first thought it what happens to all the content? Yahoo Groups launched in 2001. So all that history gets thrown on the garbage pile as of December 14?

As you might imagine there are several initiatives/tools for grabbing this content. I’ve put together a quick list here. If you know about other initiatives, please leave a comment and I’ll update. Thank you.

FOR YOUR PERSONAL CONTENT

If all you’re interested in is saving your own stuff, Yahoo has a help article at https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN31010.html that tells you where you can download your photos and files, or all your data.

GROUP INITIATIVES

Archive Team has started a page for Yahoo Group archiving strategies at https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups . There are a few Python archiving tools mentioned here, along with some head-exploding stats and graphs for just how much Yahoo Groups content is out there.

Reddit’s DataHoarder subreddit has an extensive thread about the Yahoo Groups shutdown, with several tools being mentioned. There are Python scripts and similar tools, but there are also a couple of tools mentioned that might be useful for those of y’all who are less programming-oriented:

Personal Groupware PG Offline: http://www.personalgroupware.com/pgoffline-index.htm — Downloads Yahoo Groups content, 14-day free trial version, full featured version $24.95 I think.

Groups.io: Will allow you to transfer your Yahoo Group to its platform. https://groups.io/

I will update this article as I find new options (or you mention them in the comments.) Much love.