An effort to archive Yahoo Groups is being thwarted by Verizon, according to a group of volunteer archivists
The volunteers say Verizon, which owns Yahoo, has blocked their accounts from accessing old pages on Yahoo Groups, which is slated to erase all the posted content this Saturday, Dec. 14.
To archive the affected pages, about 128 volunteers were using "semi-automated" computer tools to help them speed up the process of joining individual Yahoo Groups and saving the posted content. But due to the blocking, volunteers say they've lost access to about 80 percent of the Yahoo Groups they originally joined.
The same ban also means the volunteers can no longer use their semi-automated computer tools to rejoin the groups. "The 128 people you (Verizon) banned were REQUESTED by the group owners to get their stuff," wrote Brenda Fowler, a user who's been helping to lead the archiving effort. "Verizon refuses to give us more time to get it. We can't do it in 7 days."
In a separate post, a member of Archive Team, which has been helping to save the Yahoo Group pages, said: "We lost access to over 55,000 Yahoo Groups, many of these will now not be archived and will be lost when Yahoo deletes everything on December 14."
So why is Verizon blocking the archiving attempts? In an email to Fowler, the company would only say the archiving efforts violated Verizon's Terms of Service. No explanation was given on the exact violation, but the company's terms were written in a way to prevent bots and spammers from abusing Verizon sites.
The company has made a tool available so users can download any posted content they made to Yahoo Groups. But the same email notes that the tool will only download text. To grab photos and attachments, users have to save them individually.
Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company announced it was phasing out Yahoo Groups as a discussion boards site back in October at a time when most of the internet has transitioned to social media. In the future, Yahoo Groups will only remain available as an email list service that people can continue to use to message each other.
However, the phase-out threatens to forever erase all the content Yahoo Groups once hosted, prompting observers to wonder what valuable data will be lost (if any.) Users such as Fowler also claim the site was still in use by thousands of active groups, despite its waning popularity.
"No Verizon, these groups are NOT largely unused. You just didn't do your homework. You didn't find us, who could have told you they were used all the time," Fowler writes on a blog dedicated to rallying support to saving Yahoo Groups. In the meantime, the volunteer archivists say they'll continue trying to salvage what they can from discussion board site.