"Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo Groups"

[kane_magus]

That's pretty shitty for anyone who was ever a big user of that service.

That said, the only thing I ever used on Yahoo Groups was the Otakuwars! Mailing List. I've already sent a message to there to alert anyone who may still actually pay attention to it that it'll be gone after December 14, 2019. If I were to save anything from there, it would be, at most, my own shit, but I'm not sure if I care enough to do even that much, to be honest. :/

(EDIT)

So... just for shits and giggles, I initiated a "Groups Download" thing via the "Verizon Privacy Dashboard" (EDIT had to fix the link... I so fucking hate the fact that Facebook doesn't properly preserve URLs in posts when you copy/paste from there /EDIT) thing. It's currently doing one of those "we'll email you when your download is ready" things, so we'll see how that goes, I guess.

That said, I don't know if it's going to include the entire group, or just whatever I posted as "newkanemagus." Which would not include a single one of the posts I made from my original "kanemagus" account, given that I lost access to that years ago.

(/EDIT)

Comments

[owsf2000]

If it downloads the entire group, let me know. I'll certainly want a copy off of you. I'll see about trying to grab various things out of it and the owsf2000 group later this week. Perhaps just start manually reading and copying everything in there.

I don't ever expect to do anything OW! related ever again but having the option is always nice. There really isn't much stopping me from trying to do the OW!RPG for instance given I have all the data we had done up on that still - and nowadays I have multiple legit rpg maker programs. Including 2003. 2003 being a slightly updated version of 2000 - which added in things most people added into 2000 via plugins (playing mp3s, full motion videos, etc)

Koby and I only ever really got part of the introduction done for that game. The rest of the time was us just trying to figure out how to customized battle engines, day night systems, insanely extended switch limits, etc.

I guess if I'm going to dig around in yahoo groups I'll have to balance it with time spent designing and coding Graze Suit Alpha. Going to get back at that and make it into an Actual Game.

[kane_magus]

So far, it has downloaded jack and shit. No email notifications as of yet, and when I go to the site, it still just says "We are currently processing your download request. Please check back later," and the only option I have is to "Delete download request and files." I'm not expecting much else out of it, at this point.

If you want to give it a try on your end and hope for better results, all I did was just went here[1], logged into the Yahoo bit with my Yahoo user/pass[2], selected Groups, and then clicked that might-as-well-be-invisible fucking ... thing in the upper right to bring down the menu with the "Groups Download Manager" option.

If there is another, easier way to download anything (assuming that this method actually even works at all, which it has not, so far), I don't know. The only other way I could think of would be, like you said, to just go into each individual post and copy/paste/save-to-a-text-file or whatever, and that is absolutely not something that I'm willing to do at this time, even for my own posts. >_> Yahoo doesn't even appear to have a way to save messages even for individual messages, at least as far as I can see (aside from manual copy/paste).

There's also some other stuff under the "Photos" and the "Files" sections of the ML as well, some of which might be worth saving. Most of the stuff under "Links" just goes to broken links that used to be on otakuwars.org with the rest going to broken links on shit like angelfire or xoom or tripod or whatever, so... yeah... some of that might be retrievable via archive.org or something, maybe? I haven't bothered to try yet. Aside from that, all the other sections appear to be empty.

[1] - And I only just noticed that the URL for that Verizon manager thing was fucked in the link in the post above, thanks to Facebook's asinine practice of removing most of any URL during copy/pasting and replacing the middle part of it with "..." so I fixed it there.

[2] - Which, given I'm having to use that "newkanemagus" shit, might just make the whole exercise a moot point, if all it downloads is whatever I posted as that account, which would pretty much just be that one post I just made with the warning about Yahoo deleting everything... though if that is the case, I have no idea why it would take so long to "process" that. *shrug*

[owsf2000]

Regarding otakuwars.org, the funny thing is that back when that was still a thing and I saw everyone jumping onto the server, I knew there would be that issue with it killing virtually every OW! page on the planet when Korb no longer had that particular job. I was just surprised it happened as quickly as it did. Admittedly I let my own OW! pages to over to it, but I kept backups of everything so when otakuwars.org went down (relatively quickly imo) I was able to re-up them back to where they were originally.

Sadly I was in the minority on that, especially since a lot of website maintainers had left OW! before it went down.

And that shit about verification, yeah that pisses me off as well. I'm pretty much in the same boat with all my shit now since lycos axed their free email service. I did move everything I could think of from there to google, but google also has verification bullshit. And now and then it bugs me to confirm, which naturally I -can't-. I suppose I could put my phone number on the google account at the very least.

[kane_magus]

Otakuwars.org went down, like, what, after only a year or so, right? I can't recall when it was actually started, but the earliest archive.org snapshot is from October 2000. The latest semi-viable archive.org version is from July 2001, but then, the next snapshot from January 2003 (nothing in 2002, apparently) and everything after that just leads to those not-a-real-website websites that they replace defunct websites with.

Anyway, I never even bothered trying to do much with what I had on there. Even the angelfire site had more shit on it than that. (Oh man... this thing... ugh. *eye roll*)

And... holy shit, speaking of my angelfire site, it still exists. I'm actually shocked at that. Not that it really matters, given that I can't log in anymore, but the fact that it's still there at all is kind of weird. *shrug*

And I forgot that the ML was actually started on eGroups (and it's a damn good thing that we didn't try to move it from there to otakuwars.org) and that eGroups was later bought by Yahoo. And now Verizon owns Yahoo, and shit sucks.

[kane_magus]

and it's a damn good thing that we didn't try to move it from there to otakuwars.org

On the other hand, maybe if we had moved it all to otakuwars.org, it's possible it would still be available now via archive.org, which is more than can be said for the Yahoo Groups ML. (Or, at least, up to the point where otakuwars.org also went the way of the dodo, anyway. After that, we'd have been SOL again, I guess.)

[kane_magus]

And now, over a week and a half later, that website still says "We are currently processing your download request. Please check back later."

So, basically, it's useless horseshit.

[owsf2000]

I completely forgot about yahoo deleting it's shit afterwards so odds are it's all gone for good with the few exceptions here and there of people that properly crossposted to the newsgroup - which even I didn't do all the time I'd have to admit. Of course this assumes google will keep google groups running forever as well.

Pretty sure that was one of the reasons for starting the egroup/yahoogroup originally - so there'd be a permanent archive given newsgroups were inherently non-permanent.

I remember downloading most uploaded materials for OWSF2000's group. Granted whether I could find that content again among the backups is another question. ^_^ Unfortunately for OW! though it's just whatever was saved to the archive or my own website (Which included a lot of my own posts in threads for at least 2000-2002?)

[kane_magus]

Well, for what it's worth, I did get another email from them on December 21, 2019 which said the following:

---

Dear Group Moderators and Members,

In recent weeks, we communicated the latest changes to Yahoo Groups and explained how to request a download of any content you’ve previously posted to the platform. Some Groups users asked us for more time, and in response to these requests, we have decided to extend the deadline. Groups users now have until Friday, January 31, 2020 at 11:59pm PST to submit a request for their data.

We have now taken down all user content from the Yahoo Groups website. However, we will continue to accept users’ requests for their data until January 31, 2020, and will ensure these have been fulfilled prior to deleting the data.

For additional support, users can email YahooGroupsEscalations@verizonmedia.com and our team will troubleshoot any issues.

Best,
The Yahoo Groups team

---

That "extend the deadline" link just redirects to a Twitter post, the replies to which are a bunch of people telling them that their shit doesn't work.

I'm not going to bother trying again. I mean, it didn't work the first time, so... *shrug* In the middle of typing this, I just paused and put in another request via the Verizon Dashboard bullshit thing again. Just as it did before, it's telling me "Your download request has been accepted. We will update this section as soon as your data is ready for download." I don't expect it to work any better the second time than it did the first time.

(EDIT) Here's the thing that I'm still not sure of: when you "request your data" do you get everything, or does that mean only the stuff that you posted yourself? Because if it's the latter case, "newkanemagus@yahoo.com" isn't going to be getting more than just a post or two, since "kanemagus@yahoo.com" was lost to the ether due to old-ass password verification failure bullshit because of defunct emails and such. (/EDIT)

And... I just went to check the OW! Yahoo Groups page itself. Everything is gone, as expected. Oh well. *sigh*

Yeah, it's kind of ironic now that likely the only stuff that's still even remotely available and accessible today is the stuff that was posted to actual alt.fan.sailor-moon, rather than to the ML. Google Groups search is probably the best bet for that, shitty and nigh useless as it is now. (At least until Google inevitably pulls a Yahoo [or, you know, pulls a Google] and eventually kills Google Groups entirely.) There are, apparently, other Usenet search/archive things available, but they cost cash money to use, and I, personally, am not that interested in trying to preserve the fucking OtakuWars! to pay for using those. ¬_¬

[kane_magus]

It's also ironic that (currently, at least) the top-most result when you do a search for "alt.fan.sailor-moon 'OW!'" on Google Groups is this thread in which people were either complaining about how the ML sucked ass and how OW! should be returned solely to the NG or people were trying to explain why the ML was not so bad (or people were wondering why bother posting to the NG at all *weary sigh*).

(I linked to my own post in that thread there, because why not. Here is the OP of that thread, fwiw. [The actual search result went to this post by Miles Rost, though. >_>])

Also, speaking of Google Groups, it looks like there isn't an "Advanced Search" available anymore, which sucks even more ass. Or, if there is one, I have no idea how to go about accessing it now. It looks like Google has already reduced functionality of Groups to be as bare-assed as it can possibly be, short of killing it altogether.

[owsf2000]

I tried clicking your search link and got nothing at all. ^^ I don't even remember my password (or username!) to log in to google groups. I browsed the alt.fan.sailor-moon itself and noticed while the posts to the newsgroup per year this decade appear to be finger-countable, there were still posts that were on topic.

Last "OW!" attempt appears to have been in 2010 by, naturally, Cape-Mike. A newb did a few 1-2 sentence replies to him then stopped replying. And Harold chimed in about no endurance with newbies these days. Scrolling down a little further it reveals that's about 1 year after -our- last attempt at doing an OW! thread in 2009. XD

--

"And now that I have some jellybean coffee, can we continue playing
without people looking at us like we're unreasonably insane?" NC-
Janitor asked, causing everyone to glare at Senshi Gemini. "Excellent.
Let's get this started."

[kane_magus]

Well, whaddayaknow... it actually worked this time. Got an email saying "download of your data is ready." Went back to the site and clicked the "Download" link there. It downloaded a 25MB zip file[1] that contains, as far as I can tell, basically everything (messages, files, photos, etc.), from both the OtakuWars! ML and the OWSF2000 ML. Not just "newkanemagus" shit, but all of it.

The only "problem" is that all of the message are in huge (10MB each, unzipped) "mbox" files that have to be opened in a mail client like Mozilla Thunderbird or whatever. Haven't really messed with that much, except to make sure that they were at least viewable, so not sure how easy (or possible) it is to extract out individual messages from that, or whatever, but at least they're there.

[1] - Which I have already uploaded to my Google Drive for anyone who wants it. Confirmed it should work without having to be logged into Google. Though it gives a "Whoops! There was a problem with the preview" error, it still provides a download link.

[owsf2000]

Downloaded it for safe keeping at the very least. I don't really have any email client installed on the comp so won't be able to open them I guess any time soon. Maybe next time I update my comp I'll consider it.