Friday, May 14, 2004

apparent deletion of archives on yahoogroups

I was surfing john o'keefe's Postmodern Theology Discussion Group when it seemed that I could not surf earlier than message #3157

This hasn't happened in the faithmaps discussion group yet, but I seem to remember that yahoo announced they were going to begin doing deleting older messages to save space. I really HATE this because I like have a written record of the history of our online communities and there's no easy way I know of to archive old messages other than doing so one at a time. Before 'mapper jon gold passed on I valued his contributions to the 'mapper community so much that I actually archived and indexed his posts (jon was a brilliant professional philosopher, a pastor, and a dear friend). It was a labor-intensive process and I honestly can't see doing for the 10's of 1000's of 'mapper posts.

Moreover, I view the archives of this and several other emerging discussion groups as a rich repository of information. One could argue that a significant portion of the history of the emerging church movement has been in these groups. I think a long time ago I emailed yahoo inquiring as to whether archived messages might be avail for purchase, but I don't think I've ever received a response from yahoo about anything I've ever emailed them about.

ugh - any brilliant ideas?

5 comments:

David Blakeslee said...

I moderate a Yahoo!group and I would definitely like to have a back-up archive of the posts in hand before Yahoo! starts deleting them. Stephen, do you know if John O'Keefe was notified prior to the deletion?

I went to the yahoo2mbox page but I don't really know how to do all that stuff. Instructions: "run the script with the name of the group..." That's pretty vague to me. So if you wind up using this program and can walk me through it somewhat, let me know. Dean, if you are interested in helping me out, let me know as well.

email: pomoxian@yahoo.com

Thanks!

Stephen said...

Hi guys,

Thanks David. Good to hear from you! Dean, I'm definitely interested in your help on using this tool - I don't know Perl at all. I wonder if there might be more user friendly tools out there?

Stephen said...

And Dean, can I get your email addr?

Dean said...

Still trying to figure out the comments provided by blogger. If you click my name, it takes you to my profile page, on which in the top left corner is my email address ( dean@dean-o.org ) and my AIM Screen Name ( dron321 ). I don't use a Blogger blog anymore, so having to use Bloggers profile page for comments seems a little bogus, but of course, they're still getting the kinks worked out.

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