Hello fellow hams, Some of you may know that Yahoo Groups is going to be shutting down in a couple of weeks. While members will still be able to email back and forth, the UI and other features will be shut off. "So what?" you might ask, "I haven't thought about yahoo groups in years ..." If you've ever tried to repair an old radio, or research certain radios, chances are you've come across a Yahoo group that had lots of good info about your radio in it. For almost 20 years hams have been asking questions and helping one another in yahoo groups, and it would be a shame to see that repository of knowledge lost. Groups that are well-maintained and active are generally migrating to groups.io, but there can be a fee charged to migrate legacy content. This process is also not very smooth, and many group admins have not migrated or have no intention of moving the old posts to the new platform. For groups that are not well maintained or whose admins have gone SK or AFK, there isn't much hope. Over the past month I've been backing up and archiving as many Yahoo groups as I could using a tool I found on github. I would hate to see these repositories of knowledge disappear when Yahoo flips the light switch later this month. The listing of all the groups can be found here: https://www.k5qo.com/yahoo_groups/ These are the groups I have been able to successfully scrape. Many others were attempted but for one reason or another I wasn't able to get a good copy. Reasons include: enormous amounts of spam in the group, Yahoo API throwing way too many failures (are they already shutting down servers? maybe.), or admins not allowing me access to the group. Think of this archive as a time capsule snapshot of these groups. They can't be added to or edited, and hopefully they are active and living on in new platforms. List of groups: AlincoDJ-596 AlincoDJ-G7 AlincoDR-635 AlincoDX-70TH alinco_all Alinco_DJ-G7T Alinco_DX-SR8 dj-g5 DJ-G29T DJ-X7T DJ-X30T dstar_digital DX70 FT-8800R FT-8900R FT100 FT897 IC-706 IC-751A IC-761 IC-2720H ic-7600 IC-R20 IC-V8000 ic-w32 ic400pro IC745 IC746 ic756 IC910H IC2200 ICOM-IC-706 Icom-IC-T90 icom-ic7610 ICOM-R8500 Icom-T81A ICOM718 icom746pro IcomIC-820H IcomIC-7300 IcomIC706mk2g ICOMR3 icomR5 ICOMR71AFILES ICOMR71A icomr75 IcomR7000Rx IcomRadioSuppor IcomRadio icomsoftware Icom_756Pro Icom_IC-2820H ICOM_IC-R8500 icom_IC92AD ICOM_ID-31A_ID-51A_DSTAR Icom_ID31-Icom_ID51 ICOM_MOBILE_RADIOS IC_735 KenwoodTS-2000 Kenwood_TS50 MURS-OPEN RadioModification TS-520_820_530_830 VX-2R VX-3R YAESUVX5 YAESUVX7 Yaesu_FT-450
Too bad there's no way to filter out the useless information and logically arrange the useful information. For example, say I want to find if anyone has used an IC-V8000 for a 2M CW beacon transmitter. How do you key it on/off to get past the obscenely long T/R switching times? There's 300 pages of posts within the IC-V8000 forum. I find it intolerable to look through 300 pages of posts (x20 posts on each page?) to try to find if someone has successfully done that. Unfortunately, all internet forums have basic information that's repeated ad infinitum and everything else just fades into obscurity.
I think that's got more to do with why yahoo sucked in the 1st place , and now is less & getting worse .
There is a search functionality, but you have to click a button towards the top center of the page to load the search bar. But as far as categorizing stuff, we're probably out of luck until someone trains a ham radio AI to handle that task
Andrew, Here's a much belated THANK YOU for your effort! I don't mind it being a bit cumbersome to search, because you have truly saved all this information from "fading into obscurity." Cheers to You! David / N2PQW
