Wonder if we could make a deal with all those casino seo spammers from indonesia. (Or whoever sells their service to them.)
If they will use their cache of yahoo addys to exfiltrate Yahoo Group content, we'll give them a free month of gitlab user spam usage no questions asked.
I had this. Once I added a backup email address, it worked. I found this by trial and error. It seems that Yahoo doesn't consider its email addresses to be valid.
Recaptcha is the crappiest product Google makes, in my opinion. If they're as bad at detecting a human, they shouldn't even be trying. I can solve 10 puzzles correctly in a row and it's still thinks I'm not a human.
You can join a Yahoo group by sending a blank email to "<groupname>-subscribe@yahoogroups.com". There is no CAPTCHA, only an automated email confirmation which you reply to. Is there a reason why that wouldn't work for this project?
This is the third time I have seen this suggested. Maybe get in touch, and try to suggest that. I am also in a tight schedule these days and it would be easier to help with money.
Yahoo started by building an index of the internet but instead of using an algorithm, they primarily relied on people crawling the web and categorizing websites and curating things. It was a people powered directory.
Jumped in when we were joining groups starting with 'S', and now we're already at 'E'. Really satisfying.
Given that my account got a connection attempt from Sweden, I guess that's where the archivist live. Hopefully he will have a nice morning tomorrow thanks to the community.
I started joining groups a few hours ago and now have 43. The first group I joined started with U. Then there were some with T, some with S, and I'm at R now.
I'd rather we archive large or relevant groups first instead of going alphabetically and having to join groups with just 1 post.
Apparently now that they have gotten through the Fandom groups, and are working through the groups that were requested to be archived, they are ranked in order of number of members. So they are working on progressively smaller groups.
Some things I noticed about google re-captcha already. It can't tell the difference between a 3x3 matrix of a house and a bus, it doesn't know the difference between scooters and motorcycles, it has a margin of error on fire hydrants/usually the last image that it asks you to identify a fire hydrant in and fades out will not bring up another fire hydrant so you can click verify early.
Recaptcha doesn't know the difference between anything. It's just trying to gather consistently tagged training data of regions which can in turn be used to train something that can identify objects.
Crowdsourced labeling doesn't make sense if you already have something that can tell you what the label should be.
I believe I read something on HN months ago that claimed Google would force failures on otherwise successful captchas. Little bit of gas-lighting if true.
I wonder if groups with actual members will be OK. I'm a member of one and have several years of message digests in my email. I just downloaded all of them. For groups without members, or with no-one bothering to read them anyway, maybe it doesn't actually matter?
If they are public, yes, it should be ok. Regarding groups that are old or inactive, A couple that I'm concerned with had important early discussions, that people on other derivative groups refer to regularly.
I don't really consider those 'mainstream news', I've only heard of zdnet - I thought boingboing was a public WiFi hotspot provider.
I primarily mean newspapers. The Times (of London & New York), The Guardian, but Bloomberg too.
The story is probably a wider point about the fragility of online information, for which this is a mere significant event, but without that happening I just don't see the give-a-shit count increasing.
How can I recognise services that intend to live forever? Meetup used to have reports and mailing lists but it went to a sinking company and is now a pointless SPA which doesnt let Firefox log in. I know a group that acquired several competing products, and they missed a crucial innovation which the indies had for a while.
For organisations, the best you might be able to do is some kind of co-operative: it's much less likely to sell out (although not impossible), you generally get a vote in how it's run, and since they're forced to be self-funding you're not dependent on VC funding whims. With sufficient runway transparency you can always know how far they are away from shutdown and how much funding they need.
Twenty years ago (!) I helped set up a hosting co-op for university societies: https://www.srcf.net/
One of our specific aims was preserving continuity. Most societies are run by undergraduates who do it for a year or two and leave after 3 years, so making it as easy as possible to handle handover was a key feature. It's done pretty well for something that pre-dates Facebook, Github, Myspace, and even Yahoo Groups itself.
Oh, it's been years since I was involved with any of the actual running of it. I don't even have a shell account any more. In the early days it was "the server", a spare PC that was donated. These days it looks like they have a donated cluster: https://www.srcf.net/faq/about#system
The "backend" will be Apache. On day 1 we used SSI (server-side includes) for "theming" pages, which were all in handwritten HTML. I suspect it's still like that given the five blank lines before DOCTYPE. It looks like some bootstrap CSS has been sprinkled on it since then. There's no front-end Javascript because there doesn't need to be.
> Until 2006 we had just one server in use, kern (a dual Athlon 1.6GHz PC with 2GB of RAM and 400GB of disk). Before that we used to run on an ancient Intel Pentium running at 166MHz with 128MB of RAM. How times have changed :)
Indeed. That ancient system was perfectly adequate for serving web pages to a few thousand people for light use. At the time I was carrying around the amazing new thing that was a computer you could fit in your pocket and play music illegally downloaded from the internet on. It was a Toshiba Libretto 30 with 8MB (eight megabytes) of RAM and a PCMCIA sound card.
Our systems approach to the SRCF was very much "what is the simplest thing that could possibly work". Apache+CGI+PHP with UNIX user accounts will get you a long way if you let it.
The real achievement is political and personal. I'm amazed that they've always managed to find good enough volunteer staff for the whole thing for twenty years.
How many more groups are left to join? There's no easy to way as far as I can tell to get a sense of completion. The extension goes in reverse alphabetical order, but also loops around again.
Is there any market to run a self sustained website like Yahoo Groups? By self sustained, I mean that there would be income that would pay the hosting costs.
There's absolutely no legal basis for such a thing, though. Legally it's Yahoo's and they can shut it down and delete it tomorrow. It's only morally that they have an obligation.
If they will use their cache of yahoo addys to exfiltrate Yahoo Group content, we'll give them a free month of gitlab user spam usage no questions asked.