Kirk here. We recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of the founding of “Kumamoto International.” Obviously, Facebook wasn’t around 20 years ago so that “founding” had to occur someplace else. It was on a mailing-list platform called eGroups which was soon taken over by Yahoo Groups. Personally, I was rather underwhelmed with the quality of Yahoo Groups – a problem that was one motivating factor in Kumamoto International’s migration to Facebook. Because I had been somewhat dissatisfied with the quality of Yahoo Groups, I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that Yahoo would be ending the service. Here are some excerpts from an e-mail I got.
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Eighteen years ago, we combined the functionality of a site called eGroups.com with a precursor community platform called Yahoo Clubs to launch Yahoo Groups. . . .
Beginning October 28, 2019: Users will be able to join a Yahoo Group only through an invite from the Group Moderator or by submitting a request to join a Group, which requires approval by the Group Moderator. Since we are moving Group communication from posting on message boards to email distribution, uploading and hosting of new content will also be disabled on the Yahoo Groups website.
Beginning December 14, 2019: All Groups will be made private and any content that was previously uploaded via the website will be removed. We believe privacy is critical and made this decision to better align with our overall principles. If you would like to keep any of the content you’ve posted or stored in the past within your Yahoo Group, please download it by December 14 by accessing this link.
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I’m sorry to see the public archive go away. I think I’ll download the data but I’m not sure if I’ll have any way to put it up on the web for posterity.
At any rate, our move to Facebook will soon be complete. Of course, I’m not 100% satisfied with the Facebook platform but I guess it will have to do for now.