Yahoo! Groups is one of the world’s largest collections of online discussion boards according to their Wikipedia entry but not for much longer starting today. Yahoo! are shutting down Yahoo! Groups in all but name with content due to be deleted and all public groups made private. All you’ll be able to do (if you can even find a Group in the future) is request to join and for emails to be sent to group members. Effectively Yahoo! Groups will just be a group email address.
I can remember my first experience of the Internet and, before the days when Google ruled the world, as soon as you broke out from AOL or Compuserve who did their best to keep you on their own content, Yahoo! ruled the roost. Yahoo! Messenger was the favourite (way before Whatsapp, Snapchat or TikTok came along), Yahoo! search was pretty OK and just about everyone I know used Yahoo! email addresses.
Now I hardly know anyone that uses Yahoo! for anything but what’s more important isn’t who uses Yahoo! today but that a large part of the historical internet is about to be deleted forever. Yahoo! will be deleting all photos and files as well as polls and message history. Anything stored in Yahoo! Groups will be gone forever, and as they were once such a large part of the Internet much will be irreplaceable and not backed up on other platforms.
For those that have content on Yahoo! Groups, the features going are: Files; Polls; Links; Photos; Folders; Calendar; Database; Attachments; Conversations; Email Updates; Message Digest; and Message History.
As of today, Monday the 28th of November 2018, you are no longer be able to upload any content to the site. On or around the 14th of December 2019, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed.
You can download your content here if you wish to save it.
