(Disclaimer: I don't work directly with Archive Team, but I work for the Internet Archive, which is where most of this data will end up living hopefully forever. We're also in the midst of our annual fund drive -- https://archive.org/donate/ if you're able and interested in helping out monetarily.)
The title of this post is very misleading. Verizon has made no change to the schedule of the shutdown other than allowing more time for end-users to request a partial download of data that they've posted. These downloads are incomplete and do not contain much of the metadata required to be useful for archiving.
Verizon are giving a tiny, meaningless concession to change the narrative and make everything seem fine now, but it is not. A vast trove of important historical information will become inaccessible and essentially lost forever in less than four days.
Verizon provides no way for anyone to download a complete, archival quality copy of groups. The only method currently available is by using the third party software that Verizon is attempting to block and this method will become completely unavailable after the 14th.
Sorry, I was trying to get the date/etc into the field. Maybe someone can suggest a better title.
Given that this was just announced, we don't really know what's going to happen, but it does seem like they're going to disable access on the 14th as expected, and provide their broken tool for downloads after that (until the latter deadline). All the more reason to download as much as we can as quickly as we can, and continue putting pressure on Verizon.
3 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 20.0 ms ] threadInfo about the archival process: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups
Details about downloading groups you're a member of: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qNCAgMN-Q9koFK1EzEFek2k4...
Tooling to do this from the CLI: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/yahoo-group-archiver
If you want to help the effort, run yahoogroups-joiner to help the Archive Team join as many public groups as possible: https://github.com/davidferguson/yahoogroups-joiner
Run the Archive Team Warrior if you have available compute/storage: https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior
(Disclaimer: I don't work directly with Archive Team, but I work for the Internet Archive, which is where most of this data will end up living hopefully forever. We're also in the midst of our annual fund drive -- https://archive.org/donate/ if you're able and interested in helping out monetarily.)
Verizon are giving a tiny, meaningless concession to change the narrative and make everything seem fine now, but it is not. A vast trove of important historical information will become inaccessible and essentially lost forever in less than four days.
Verizon provides no way for anyone to download a complete, archival quality copy of groups. The only method currently available is by using the third party software that Verizon is attempting to block and this method will become completely unavailable after the 14th.
Given that this was just announced, we don't really know what's going to happen, but it does seem like they're going to disable access on the 14th as expected, and provide their broken tool for downloads after that (until the latter deadline). All the more reason to download as much as we can as quickly as we can, and continue putting pressure on Verizon.