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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.
At least you can be sure that nobody is working from home.
Seems like Yahoo worked better back when they allowed WFH...
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.
It used to be quite good until MM became CEO and they switched to infinite scroll, inserting ads into the lists, and other inconveniences. They sacrified usability for a modern look. When they "improved" the UI many users and admins complained but Y! refused to rollback. Their user based dropped quite a bit.
carrier pigeons have been downed by high winds. Yahoo groups? Who the heck is still using that?
Actually many groups such as bayscan, Parachute Mobile, various clubs as it is convenient in sense of mailing lists and a place to put photos, files, and various documents. Some of these people have tried other groups such as IO and Google groups though overall doesn't seem to cause a huge migration from yahoogroups. Of course for IT/Linux/Unix/Network gurus always have something better but most people are not such gurus (analogy of why most people buy tickets to ride an airplane instead of flying their own). Google groups is ok but from what I have experienced not much better. Also many yahoogroups have been around for decades so there's a lot of legacy. What may obliterate yahoogroups is if they extensively change the format where it becomes not usable (kind of like hotmail).
Laugh what you want but geocities was of great value. Sure it never had the luster of what an IT/Linux/Unix/Network guru can build, it had that primitive 1990s feel, many of the sites were stinkers but many had very useful information pages on various subjects. These were written by actual people who put in their personal time to share knowledge. Unlike now most webpages that show up on searches are sales/marketing websites that aggregate the same stuff over and over.
mfwright@batnet.com
Here's a script that you can use to take a mbox copy of any group mail that you like to read. I wrote it when I felt that it was getting harder to read the mail due to their 'neo' UI change.
https://www.usenix.org.uk/cont...
Why UNIX?
A weeks outage is common with Verizon, they can't even keep their land lines working.
They're not unique in that way.
I have AT&T for my landlines. My main-POTS-and-DSL landline went out in the first rain of the winter a bit over a week ago. (The fax/backup-dialup also went groundfault-noisy ruining it even for glacial dialup speeds.)
The automated testing available after-hours interpreted the water-shorted line as a phone off-the-hook and gave me a couple minutes of canned lecture about that. Once humans were back on duty, line-testing with the house wiring disconnected at the demark point convinced them that it was on their side, they said they "were overloaded" and couldn't get a repairman out to fix the line for TWO WEEKS.
So I have no landline DSL (or fixed IP addresses for my home servers) at the moment - nor did I have them over the Thanksgiving holiday. I've upped my cellphone data plan from token to substantial, so my wife can get her college homework done. That's an extra $60/month, since the cellphones are on a different service and they won't give me the boost as a freebie for covering the outage.
It's nothing like what they did about a year and a half ago. My DSL was out for an ENTIRE MONTH. It turns out they had decommissioned the DSLAM that fed my line. Then they moved me to another one that was PARTIALLY decommissioned - gave one-hop transport to itself but had no internet behind it. Then they claimed the legacy modem was broken (actually it was one of theirs, but from before the web administration interface was standard so it LOOKED broken), had me buy a new one, then refused to support it because I hadn't bought it from THEM. I had to buy a SECOND new one before they'd look at the line enough to figure out that the DSLAM wasn't hooked to the net on the upstrem side and moved me to ANOTHER one that was. (This also downgraded me to PPPoEoATM, with more overhead and thus somewhat less effective data rate on the same carrier setting.)
I'd have abandoned them back then, but the only alternatives at the site are satellite, Comcast, and 4G cellphone. B-b
And THIS is in Silicon Valley!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way