Archving the old Yahoo! group

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a Joe
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Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by a Joe »

So Yahoo! has decided they will shutter most of the groups function and delete all content on December 14th. Not a surprise, since Yahoo! has been on life support for 10 years now. But, that group does have quite a bit of Quizbowl history on it and should be properly archived for historical purposes. Is there already an archive of the board's contents, and if not, can one be made prior to the December 14 deletion date? I confess that I'm too young to know the mechanics of Yahoo! groups and have never used it or even had a Yahoo! account in my life, so while I could make an attempt to archive important things, I don't believe I am the best person for the job.
"THE" Joe Feldman
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The Goffman Prophecies
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by The Goffman Prophecies »

I'm not in the group, but if an archive exists somewhere (or one is created before 14 Dec), I'd be glad to host it on the site.
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Stained Diviner
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by Stained Diviner »

It's at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/quizbowl/info. You have to be a group member to get access, and the Join Now button does not work.
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tiwonge
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by tiwonge »

I am a member of the group. I'd be fine with loaning my Yahoo password if somebody who wants to archive it needs access. (I don't really use it for anything.)
Colin McNamara, Boise State University
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AKKOLADE
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by AKKOLADE »

Fred Morlan
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former hsqbrank manager, former NAQT writer & subject editor, former hsqb Administrator/Chief Administrator
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Cody
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by Cody »

Thanks to Colin, I have archived the jucoqb (public and overrun with spam so will require some fixing), qb-canada, qbtrash, quizbowl, and quizbowl-announce groups using IgnoredAmbience's yahoo-group-archiver (-t -r -f -i -l -p -a -m) recommended by the Archive Team. (I also have plain email messages in json [no attachments or other group data] using YahooGroups-Archiver linked by Fred....just in case.) h/t to everyone in this thread and whoever gave me access to qb-canada.

The caveat is that photos do not download well. Yahoo! is doing something wonky and fucks you over with random 404 errors even though the photos exist on their server and can be downloaded with the appropriate amount of persistence. I manually downloaded and appropriately named every photo from the quizbowl group separately from the yahoo-groups-archiver backup, but the qb-canada group will be missing some photos.

At some point I will tinker with yahoo-group-archive-tools, but that will require me to install perl and some perl modules which is more difficult than the python scripts. For now, the raw data has been downloaded and is safe on my Dropbox. If anyone is willing to serve as an additional backup, please contact me at [email protected]. The zip file of the yahoo-group-archiver git repository containing all the data is ~100 MB.
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by Cody »

I got the yahoo-group-archive-tools figured out and was able to do some validation using Windows Mbox Viewer. Unfortunately, all messages before June 5, 1999 @ 8:30pm (the first 301 messages) are lost. The downloads do not have a message body, and trying to access these posts in the group yields a blank message body. I have downloaded an HTML page of the group that show the message snippets from Dec 30, 1998 to June 5, 1999 @ 12:31 am. If these messages somehow become accessible before the new deletion date in January, I will redownload them.
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by 1.82 »

I missed this thread earlier, but I actually have the entire Yahoo group (at least through December 7, 2008) saved on my hard drive, as well as archives of the old mailing list. I'll look into how I can disseminate this.
Naveed Chowdhury
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by AKKOLADE »

Cody wrote: Sat Dec 14, 2019 1:10 am Thanks to Colin, I have archived the jucoqb (public and overrun with spam so will require some fixing), qb-canada, qbtrash, quizbowl, and quizbowl-announce groups using IgnoredAmbience's yahoo-group-archiver (-t -r -f -i -l -p -a -m) recommended by the Archive Team. (I also have plain email messages in json [no attachments or other group data] using YahooGroups-Archiver linked by Fred....just in case.) h/t to everyone in this thread and whoever gave me access to qb-canada.
Cody, did you (or anyone else) get the group archived into something accessible?
Fred Morlan
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former hsqbrank manager, former NAQT writer & subject editor, former hsqb Administrator/Chief Administrator
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

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Jonah Greenthal
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Re: Archving the old Yahoo! group

Post by AKKOLADE »

Perfect, thanks Jonah!
Fred Morlan
University of Kentucky CoP, 2017
International Quiz Bowl Tournaments, CEO, co-owner
former PACE member, president, etc.
former hsqbrank manager, former NAQT writer & subject editor, former hsqb Administrator/Chief Administrator
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