Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 11/02/2020
Forums.Group – The New Replacement for Yahoo Groups.
New service provides a new home for Yahoo Groups that are
due to be deleted on December 15, 2020.
Cologne, Germany: Peter
Walker Systems, a small private company for IT solutions, run by a British
Ex-pat IT-Specialist, is announcing their latest project.
Forums.Group is a new forum
community platform designed to replace Yahoo Groups that has been a popular
mailing list community system for more than 20 years and is closing down on
December 15, leaving up to 10 million individual communities homeless.
Forums.Group was created by Peter Walker, a British IT expert in Germany who
has been using Yahoo Groups since 1999, to help out fellow group owners
affected by the closing of Yahoo Groups. Forums.Group can be found at https://forums.group
After the loss of the online
archives at Yahoo Groups in December 2019, there was a need for a new platform
where existing Yahoo Groups could be fully restored complete with their message
archives, files, photos and the members on a modern safe platform where members
can discuss a wide variety of topics. The Forums.Group platform has been in
development for almost a year and is now ready to go online on November 2,
2020.
With the announcement that Yahoo Groups
will be closing down completely on December 15, 2020 – the start of the new forums.group platform is timely to allow existing groups
to move to and even recover their archives on a modern phpBB forum system.
While there are a lot of
platforms Yahoo group communities could move to without their
archives, forums.group has developed a system to restore their message archives
that often go back over 20 years, from the MBox downloads offered by Yahoo last
year and/or any archives members have kept in Microsoft Outlook, including
posts made in the year after Yahoo Groups removed their archives.
The founder is Peter Walker who
himself ran several YahooGroups and online forums and has used his technical
knowledge to build a bridge between Yahoo Groups and phpBB forums.
Forums and mailing lists, like
Yahoo Groups, have a major fundamental difference. Mailing lists are designed
around members posting and receiving messages via email whereas forums are
designed for members to post and read messages on the forum website, itself. It
is often difficult for members to get used to going to a website to exchange
their views, when they are used to doing so via email.
Forums.group have therefore
worked on a custom-built interface to allow members to post and receive
messages via email, that are then posted on the forum. This works in a similar
way to Yahoo Groups, yet with minor enhancements to allow messages to be automatically
sorted into the correct categories. Whereas Yahoo Groups was basically just one
long list of thousands of messages, forums can have a wide range of separate
sections (categories) for parallel discussions on various aspects. For example,
in a group discussing cars, the YahooGroup would not differentiate between
makes of cars so members would see messages about all makes. A forum however,
can have separate sections for say Ford, General Motors, etc. and even
subsections for say discussions on motors, chassis, interior, etc. This is what
makes forums so much more flexible than Yahoo Groups could ever be.
The trick was to work out how to
keep the posts separate when sent in via email. This is done by the way the
subject line is formatted. The user just has to follow a specific way of
formatting the subject line and then the messages can be correctly assigned.
Forums.group is now ready to take
on potentially hundreds of Yahoo Groups that are seeking a new home, now that
Yahoo Groups is finally closing down for good on December 15, 2020.
While Forums.Group is not free,
it offers both free and premium level hosting, yet in both cases, there are
reasonable setup charges and fees to migrate the members and data to the new
platform.
For example, a typical Yahoo
Group with 10,000 members and 50,000 posts can be migrated to forums.group for
189 Euros, that is about $220. Running costs are then financed through
advertising or an ad-free premium level with a number of extra features is
available for an addition 90 Euros each year.
More information can be found on
the website: https:/forums.group
About Yahoo Groups: Yahoo!
Groups is a free-to-use system of electronic mailing lists offered by Yahoo!.
Prior to December 15, 2019,
Yahoo! Groups was one of the world's largest collections of online discussion
boards. It allowed members to subscribe to various groups, read subscribed
discussions online, view and share photos, files and bookmarks within a group,
access a group calendar, create polls for group members, and receive email
notifications of new discussion topics. Some groups were simply announcement
boards, to which only the group moderators could post, while others were
discussion forums. Depending on each group's settings, membership could be open
to everyone or only to invited and/or approved people.
On February 1, 2020, Yahoo! removed
online access to discussions and all other features except simple membership
management, essentially turning all groups into mailing lists, and on October
13, 2020 it announced that Yahoo Groups will shut down on December 15, 2020.
About Forums.group: Forums.Group
was formed by Peter Walker after he heard about the removal of all archived
content on Yahoo Groups. As he has been running several YahooGroups (Rife,
Rifeforum, healthmod, etc.) himself, as well as an online forum, he knew both
platforms very well. As a group owner, he was in touch with a number of other
group owners and even had a special group (healthmod) just for group owners of
health-related groups. Over a period of more than 20 years, Peter has made a
name for himself as an advocate for free-speech and fair fact-based discussions
as well as having a technical understanding of how both groups and forums
worked.
