We only have a few days left until Verizon kills off Yahoo Groups, and the volunteer archivists who’ve been battling with the company to preserve its legacy have just been dealt a crushing blow.
From the Yahoo Groups Crusade Headquarters: “The Archive Team (who is working with to save content to upload to the Internet Archive) was again blocked by Yahoo. The block is wiping out the past month of work done by hundreds of volunteers. This info was reported on their IRC channel.”
Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data. Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups – which means each group must be re-joined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past 4 weeks over the next 10 days)
On top of that, something Yahoo did has killed the last third party tool that users and owners have been using to access their messages, photos and files. (PGOlffine).. Note: not everyone who paid for the PGOffline license is being impacted by the problem. but the developer does not have a workaround. Here is their post about it.
Yahoo’s own data tools do not provide Group Photos and, as in my case, for two IDs I keep getting the data from another Yahoo account.
VERIZON / YAHOO! BAD FORM! [featheredleader/Yahoo Groups Crusade Headquarters]
(Thanks, Kelly Lewis)