The Old School Otaku Lounge

If you were involved in the Yahoo Groups system of mailing lists and groups, well, in a few days no new content will be allowed, and in December they're going away entirely. Yahoo is shutting the whole thing down. This isn't too surprising. If you have anything you want on any of those groups, now's the time to archive that stuff.

I don't know what a good replacement is. I maintain a few remnants from the mid 00s and I have directed the members to come here and sign up. It's not the same thing, but at least it's a thing.

I was under the impression that those groups did/were migrated over to Google groups. Places like alt.fan.anime and alt.fan.bgcrisis as some examples moved from usenet years ago to Google, which they seem to be active more or less. I guess if these people are going to convert their groups now's the time time to do it.

if Yahoo had just sold the whole thing to Google, I think things might have worked out better. On the other hand, Google has had its share of social media failures (G+ being a notable example). Apparently the email functionality of the Yahoo Groups will remain, which is a best case scenario; the actual mailing list part of the mailing lists did come in handy on occasion.

Thanks for the update. While not entirely unexpected, it is a shame another service is closing its doors and removing years worth of data.
Google Groups seems like a decent alternative (as mentioned earlier; it sprung off of Usenet archives after all) but the amount of spambot messages in some groups might make discussion difficult, depending on how curated it is.

Between GeoCities closing in 2009 (And Geocities Japan closing just this year) Yahoo Groups is another one to go. Other hosts such as Tripod and Angelfire are still around, but I wonder for how long.

Had no idea that Yahoo Groups was even still a thing. The Yoroiden Samurai Trooper Mailing List I was a part of back in the 90s moved there in the early to mid 2000s and pretty much died shortly there after. No idea what/how the original mailing list was hosted, just that it moved to Yahoo and membership dwindled. Agree that it's a shame that Yahoo couldn't sell it off but I doubt it was making them any money, which can also make it really hard to sell it to someone. And unlike Usenet, it doesn't have the same 'nerd-cred' value amongst Big Tech (ahem, Google) that would make it an attractive side project with low revenue generation.

Captain_EO wrote:Google Groups seems like a decent alternative (as mentioned earlier; it sprung off of Usenet archives after all) but the amount of spambot messages in some groups might make discussion difficult, depending on how curated it is.

Eternal September!

I agree entirely with where you're coming from though; I'll jump on r.a.a for research in a heartbeat but trying to do anything with a date more recent than 2004 is painful.