Yahoo! Groups

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Yahoo! Groups
Yahoo! Groups logo
Groups-yahoo-com.png
URL http://groups.yahoo.com/
Status Closing
Archiving status In progress...
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #yahoosucks (on hackint)

Yahoo! Groups is Yahoo's combination mailing list service/web forum; it's the result of the acquisition of eGroups and some other Yahoo! stuff. In addition to archives of and a web interface for mailing lists, it offers file uploads, photo uploads, links, polls, and an events calendar.

Uploading of new content will be disabled 28 October 2019, and all content, including message history, will be deleted 14 December 2019.[1] (The mailing lists themselves will continue to function.)

Public groups can be nominated for archival using this form.

It's been stable for a long time (since the late 90s), long enough for some specialised software to be developed to do backups of it. (Not many other websites can say that.)

Statistics

As of 2019-10-16 the directory lists 5619351 groups. 2752112 of them have been discovered. 1483853 (54%) have public message archives with an estimated number of 2.1 billion messages (1389 messages per group on average so far). 1.8 billion messages (86%) have been archived as of 2018-10-28.

The following graphs are slightly outdated:

Yahoo groups date created.png Yahoo groups messages per group.png Yahoo groups post date.png

Private groups of interest

Group Notes Admin consent?
numberactivation see all the press coverage Not yet contacted; FOI request made
hpslash see Fanlore page Not yet contacted

Potentially relevant: List of groups with Fanlore pages (contains both private and public groups), Archive Trans Yahoo's list (all private at last check)

Site structure

There’s a convenient JSON API. Some endpoints require logged-in group membership or other permissions (depending on group settings).

Groups

- Known params: maxHits, offset, query, sortBy (one of OLDEST, RELEVANCE, MEMBERS, LATEST_ACTIVITY, NEWEST).
- Known params: start (result index, not group id).
- Pagination: Limited to 10. Does not have a count param. May be limited to 500 total results regardless of start param.
Groups in subcategories can be listed by swapping '0' for the subcategory id (the full idList is not required). There is a /1/ with a small number of groups.

Messages

- Known params: count, start (message id, not result index), sortOrder (asc or desc), direction (1 or -1)
- Pagination: Limited to 10 by default. No known limit on count or total results. sortOrder adjusts order of results in returned json array. direction determines which way to iterate through ids from start.
Some messages may have encoding issues.[2] Sometimes (as in the linked case) the non-raw endpoint has the correct characters, sometimes it does not; this is likely related to the originating email client.

Topics

- Known params: count.

Attachments

- Known params: count, start, sort (values: TITLE, TIME), order (values: ASC, DESC)
- Pagination: Limited to 20 by default. Upper limit tested to 93

Attachment may be of several types: photo, file, ...?

Files

What do we know about folders and folder contents (for files, photos, links, and possibly attachments)?
- Known params: sfpath (pass in a pathURI to retrieve the file listings of this subdirectory)
- File type 0 are files, type 1 are directories
- No pagination (at least >100 files listed)

Photos

- Observed parameters: start, count, orderBy (values: mtime), sortOrder (values: desc, asc), ownedByMe (true/false), lastFetchTime, photoFilter (values: ALL, PHOTOS_WITH_EXIF "Originals", PHOTOS_WITHOUT_EXIF "Shared")
- No observed pagination limit, default is 20
- totalPhotos result field gives total in group
- Observed parameters: albumType (values: photomatic, normal), orderBy (values: mtime, title), sortOrder (values: desc,

asc), count, start

- No observed pagination limit, default is 12
- total result field gives total numbers of albums of the selected type in group, however this seems to have an off-by-one error for the normal type of albums
- Default albumType is normal
- photomatic albumType requires the READ permission for ATTACHMENTS
- Observed parameters similar to photos and albums endpoints, with additional ordinal sortOrder option
- Photomatic albums MUST be loaded with the albumType=photomatic parameter

Links

- Known params: linkdir
- No pagination
- linkdir takes the folder parameter from a dir. Nested folders should be joined with '/'. You need to keep track of the path to a given folder yourself (eg, linkdir + '/' + folder)

Polls

- Known params: count, start
- Default pagination count is 10, limit unknown, no total count returned
- Polls return all votes cast, non-anonymised, includes identifying metadata for all viewers

Databases

- Not paginated
- export target, parameters: format (csv, tsv)

Members

- Known params: count, start, sortBy, sortOrder, ts, tz, chrome.
- Pagination: Limited to 10 by default or a count of 100. No known limit on total results.
May be blocked for normal members (as may all the other members endpoints). Includes moderators and bouncing members, with identifying metadata.
Very often (always?) blocked for normal members.
Very often (always?) blocked for normal members.

Events

Overlaps with Yahoo Calendar API, check nsapa's branch for the code.

Python Yahoo! Group archivers

  • yahoo-group-archiver scrapes a group using the JSON API and (for private endpoints) the two cookies Yahoo uses to verify a logged-in user. Relevant forks include Frankkkkk and nsapa. Needs merging. Various branches have support (largely untested) for file attachments, photos, links, folders, and events.
  • YahooGroups-Archiver is similar, but scrapes only messages (not files or any other data). It is not currently under active development.
  • yahoo-groups-backup scrapes a group using Selenium, storing message info and metadata (both rendered message body and raw email) into a Mongo database. It also provides a script to dump its data to static HTML pages that can be viewed in the browser.

Other archivers

  • Yahoo Group Archiver: Perl, defunct.
  • PGOffline: Windows, proprietary. 14-day free trial, after which download and export is disabled (but view still works). Includes attachments. Stores data in a SQLite database internally.
  • Yahoo Messages Export: Chrome extension. Messages only. Saves as mbox.

External Links

Coverage

References