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Yahoo Groups Plagued by Downtime, Technical Issues for Almost a Week (bleepingcomputer.com)
Yahoo Groups were nonfunctional all last week, according to customers complaining on the company's support forum and Twitter. From a report: Yahoo Groups, which is a hybrid between a classic discussion board (forum) and a mailing list, was recently acquired by Verizon. The issues appear to have started last Sunday, November 17, when users began complaining that they could not access the site, and when the site was up, users could not start new discussions and post new messages. In addition, when posting messages and starting new topics was possible, Groups would not send email notifications to the other group participants. Similarly, Yahoo Groups would not create web posts for replies people sent in via email.
This is old history now in Internet terms, but Yahoo Groups began as EGroups, which basically put a web GUI on listserv. It made it easier to create and participate in listserv-style email discussions.
After Yahoo acquired it, it kind of went to crap as they attempted to monetize it and integrate it with the rest of their site, but it was still the only big game in town for that particular type of discussion.
Even by the mid-2000s many people had gone over to web forums (mostly PHPBB and their counterparts) and now 'big social media' has been siphoning off users from there. PHPBB style web forums are still vastly superior to the likes of Facebook for serious threaded discussions and presentation of information. On Facebook and their ilk, everything gets lost in the shuffle, no organization. Too informal. I hope that traditional web forums survive alongside the social media giants, as a conduit for serious, archived discussions.