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Health-Related YahooGroup Archives
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YahooGroup Owners
Important news as to what happened to ALL Yahoo Groups.

Yahoo Groups have now removed the archives of all their groups. ALL previously posted content on the site was permanently removed on December 16, 2019.

  • Files
  • Polls
  • Links
  • Photos
  • Folders
  • Calendar
  • Database
  • Attachments
  • Conversations
  • Email Updates
  • Message Digest
  • Message History

Although it is still possible to send out messages to other members after December 16, there are no online archives at all. It is now no more than an email redirection service. This has seriously reduced the usability of the groups as it is no longer be possible to read the previous messages online.

So what does this mean for Yahoo Group Owners?
On December 16, the entire archives of all YahooGroups were removed are are no longer accessable on Yahoo. On this date, it was also no longer possible to migrate to the groups.io platform. If you have not moved your group somewhere else, without your archives, the only option now available is to migrate to the Forums.Group platform with your archives and members intact.
On YahooGroups, it is no longer possible to post new messages online, all posting has to be done via email - a major backstep in my opinion making the platform even more uninviting.

I have been investigating the options that we group owners can use and wanted to share the advice with other Group Owners.

The most popular option appears to have been to move to groups.io. It is very similar to Yahoo Groups with a few extra functions. They also offered a migration service from YahooGroups to make it easy for us to migrate there. Unfortunately, they have stopped accepting transfer requests for copying your archives over. If you have not requested a transfer by now - it is too late.



As out of 10 million groups, only a litle over 3000 groups were able to migrate to groups.io, we have now started a new service that enables you to migrate your YahooGroup WITH your existing archives and members, providing you have a copy of the downloadable archives from Yahoo in MBox format.

What about archive.org?
Archive.org has also tried to publicly archive the messages of as many groups as possible.

How about Facebook, Twitter, etc?
While it may be tempting to move to Facebook, Twitter, etc. with your group, they have been deleting thousands of alternative health groups on their platform and their censorship is only getting worse. It is way too dangerous to run an alternative health group on that platform. If your group is about some camera or other non-critical item, then Facebook is still a viable platform.

Is MeWe an alternative?
MeWe is an increasingly popular platform for people looking for an alternative to Facebook without the censorship. It is certainly worth considering setting up a page there if only to tell people where your website and discussion group is. We have setup a "Rife" group here.  The discussion tools are simple and limited and there are no tools for migrating your archives there.

Starting afresh with groups.io
It is no longer possible tp move your archives to groups.io, but you can at least still move your members there without your archives. You can manually invite your members to join up again, but the bettor option is to sign up for a month of premium membership so that you can then directly add your members, yourself.

Manually Creating a PDF Offline Archive
The first method requires you to have stored all the incoming emails from your group in Microsoft Outlook and to also have the full version of Adobe Acrobat. You also need a PC with a lot of RAM (I have 32GB). What you do is go into Outlook into the folder where you have stored all the messages from your group. Then select a group of messages - I selected a whole year at a time. Then select the "Acrobat" tab and click on "Selected Messages" / Creatw New PDF. Give the file a suitable name like Rife_2018_01-12.pdf and let it create the PDF file. If there are a lot of messages, this can take 20-30 minutes but it is worth it. You end up with a nice PDF file where each message can be selected individually. I have already done this for all the messages on my Rife group and you can see the files here (click on the Messages button):

Experiment with how many messages you can do. I can get it to do about 4000 messages in one PDF, any more and the process crashes.

PDF files are universally readable and are a great way of providing archives of your group posts. The disadvantages of this method is that each file only contains the messages from a specific period (e.g. a year) and do not contain your attachments, files, photos and links.
Moving your Active Community to a New Home

So now we have discussed the offline archiving of those groups, how about preserving the groups in future as an active discussion group at a new location?

As there is little point in keeping the discussions on Yahoo Groups after December 16, let us look at other options:

  1. Hosting on www.rifeforum.com for $50 with offline archives: I already run a well established health related online forum using vBulletin that runs entirely on our own web-server: The Rife Forum at www.rifeforum.com. I can create as many subsections as I like and would like to offer you all the opportunity to have your own special area on the forum that you would be given full control of. I request a one-time payment of $50 for your own specialised section if you can afford it. For example, the owner of the ozonetherapy YahooGroup has moved their group to the Rife Forum and their existing archives are available for download here on groups.rifeforum.com. A dedicated Ozone Therapy section has been created on the Rife Forum under the category of their choice, in this case "Other Health Topics." The forum is setup to be able to send all new posts in that section to the existing Yahoo Group. Yahoo is continuing the existing groups as email only groups so the existing members can remain there and still read the new posts. They only have to join the Rife Forum in order to make new posts or reply to others. Those that just want to lurk and read new messages can remain on the same Yahoo Group they are already a member of. They will, however, have to change their settings to "Individual Emails" or "Daily Digest" as there will be no online archives anymore on YahooGroups. For more flexibility, such groups can also be moved to groups.io (unless they discuss vacinations) and it is possible to move the members automatically to the new group for just a one-time fee of $20 (more details below).

    The members of that group will simply need to register to join the forum (free) if they want to post or reply, and that also means they not only have access to their own section for future discussions, they can also gain access to the vast amount of knowledge and posts already on the Rife Forum. They are being welcomed into a larger well established platform that cannot be taken away by any big-tech censorship. My interests are to help preserve all the valuable discussions and grow the Rife Forum more. I, of course hope that some members will order a premium membership (optional for each member, not required) that is used to pay the running costs of the system. This is the simplest and best option and a win-win situation for all of our groups. The Rife Forum is well established and already has about 12800 members and 46000 posts well sorted in numerous categories. If you have not joined it yet, you are very welcome to join now - it's free and available now!

  2. Hosting on groups.io for $20 without your existing messages archives (your members can download them from this website), but with full transfer of your members, files, photos and links: You could also choose to make a fresh start with an empty group on groups.io using the free option with more limited features. Although the free option does not let you automatically subscribe your existing members, you can send them invites that allows them to join by simply confirming the invite. They also offer a premium plan for one month ($20) that allows you to directly add your existing members. That sounds like a good user-friendly compromise for those on a tight budget and will ensure that your users have less hassle with the move. We have done that with our
    Rifeforum Yahoo Group as the existing archives were not important (available on The Rife Forum itself). You can upload the File and Photo archives yourself, it is only the message archives that are missing.
    Important: If your group discusses the dangers of vacinations, you will NOT be permitted to run a group on groups.io. Such topics are permitted on The Rife Forum.

  3. Hosting on the new Forums.Group platform with your archives and members restored: There are one-time costs involved with migrating to the new platform, but your group and messages will be intact and you have full freedom-of-speech.
I am not Technically Minded and need help
If you need help moving your group to  forums.group, we can do the work for you and set it all up.
Click here to learn more about this service.


Helping People to Find our new Groups
One of the biggest dangers of splitting up all the thousands of Yahoo Groups is that members will no longer know where to find their groups. Many users set their membership to "No Email" and have no idea that their Yahoo Groups have moved elsewhere. I have therefore setup the list of related Yahoo Groups on this website along with their status and where they have moved to. Please inform your members about this website and also keep me informed of any changes needed to update this list on the home page. I will also be updating the links on www.rifeshop.com and I welcome any comments, corrections and suggestions for that website as well.

Group Owners have a history of working together and helping each other out. This is something we need now more than ever at a time of big-tech censorship closing down accounts of major natural health websites like naturalnews.com and greenmedinfo.com to name only two. The deletion of the archives of 10 million Yahoo Groups is a major attack on the accululation of independant knowledge. By working together, we can help to preserve our own networks and find other groups and be found by others.

In Summary:
  • All Yahoogroups no longer accept uploads and all messages and files were deleted on December 16, 2019.
  • Our offline backups of those YahooGroups were kept up to date until they went offline.
  • Please also pass this message on to any other group owners you know that are probably also worried as to how to save their groups.
  • Keep an eye on this website for more news and I will assume it is OK to release the offline backups of your groups here unless you tell me not to.
  • For more details on the deletion of Yahoo Groups, see this official page: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/SLN31010.html
  • The Rife Forum has archived a  number of related groups for offline use, so that all that knowledge will not be lost.
  • All Yahoogroups had their messages, files, photos and links deleted on December 16, 2019.
  • If you are not a member of The Rife Forum, join now as the Rife community will continue at www.rifeforum.com
  • The Rifeforum Yahoogroup has always been an email only group without visible archives. That has already been moved to https://groups.io/g/rifeforum

Finally, I would like to thank all the group owners for their tireless work running their communities. It is people like us that have helped many thousands of people to be better informed in often lifesaving and life-changing ways

Regards

Peter Walker
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This website is owned and run by Peter Walker: Contact. Disclaimer: The authors of this web site do not engage in the practice of medicine; we are not a medical authority, nor do we claim to have medical knowledge. In all cases we recommend that you consult your own physician regarding any course of treatment or medicine. We cannot accept any responsibility for any actions made based on what is read on this or other sites. This site is not affiliated with Yahoo in any way.

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