dilbert said:
anyone know the best way to copy an abandoned yahoo group site (the
moderator approves the subscriber)? This is for someone I know who
wants access to the group.
I did tell her that I can't giver her my yahoo password as it is the
site for my email address.
So why doesn't your friend get their own member account so she can login
to the unidentified Yahoo Group? Have you create her own free Yahoo
Mail account. She doesn't even have to visit there on a regular basis
to keep up with the messages. She just needs to create her member
account and configure it to send her e-mails when there are new
messages. I believe she can even reply to those e-mails to submit her
replies into the groups, similar to how mailing lists for discussion
groups. Whether the e-mail function is available depends on how the
group's owner configured that group.
If she wants to participate in a Yahoo Group (even to just lurk), let
her create her own member account there. You don't need to get
involved. Have her start reading at:
http://help.yahoo.com//l/us/yahoo/groups/original/members/index.html
As I recall, you had to first create a Yahoo Mail account (they're free
but the free accounts don't give you access to their POP & SMTP mail
servers except maybe for a lingering few regional domains for Yahoo).
Then you requested to join a Yahoo Group. The owner or a moderator
would decide whether or not to let you in. Once accepted, follow the
instructions on using e-mail to get and send messages to and from the
Yahoo Group.
If the Yahoo Group is abandoned then the owner is no longer there to
grant access to it and the moderators are all gone, too. So just how
were you going to get into the group to copy anything from there? Also,
why would your female friend care about an abandoned group's messages?
It would be a read-only situation. If abandoned then it's not like she
can actually participate in the group. It's abandoned (according to
you). She won't be able to create a new member account there to utilize
the web and e-mail interfaces to that group's messages. Maybe you still
have a member account there. If not, you're not getting in, either.
The presumption of why *she* can't get into the group is that a member
account is required which pends acceptance by the group owner or a
moderator. If it is an open group (no login) then obviously both you
and her can use the web interface to the Yahoo Group. There are private
groups (membership required) and public groups (no membership). Can't
tell what type is the Yahoo Group because you chose to keep it a secret.
For example, the Internet Explorer help group is a public group
(
http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/internetexplorerhelp/). I
didn't say it was a useful group (it's full of spammers and trolls) but
just an example of a public group that your friend can go look at
without you doing anything for her.
Although it is a public group, there are still advantages in becoming a
member as "Members only" functionality opens up for use within the
group. For a public group, joining is easy: just login under your Yahoo
account, click the Join button in the group, and answer a couple
questions. You are automatically joined without having to wait for
acceptance.
I found no export function to let you extract messages from a Yahoo
Group. That's because all Yahoo Groups are moderated (whether the owner
wants to moderate or not). Control over the group remains with the
owner that created the group or to others to which he assigns
permissions. The idea is this is a template web-based forum and all
messages remain within that forum. E-mail is the only way to get
messages in and out of their forums but only as individual e-mails (when
a post is added) or as a daily digest (showing all posts added that
day). There is e-mail feature to digest all of the messages to then
batch them all out to your e-mail address. When you're in a Yahoo
Group, you're expected and required to inhabit that place, not transport
their property elsewhere. You are in a forum despite the use of the
word "group". There is no peering of the group's content elsewhere as
it is with the worldwide mesh network of NNTP servers for Usenet.
With Yahoo Groups, you go there to be there, not to be somewhere else.
Because e-mail subscription is permitted (in most groups, not all), you
could go through the very manual process of either:
- Copy each message and paste it elsewhere to compile your own message
archive. You use copy-and-paste to extract the content of messages.
- View each message one at a time and forward it to your e-mail address.
You use your e-mail address (the one you used to become a member of
the group) to receive a forwarded copy of each message in the group
that you forward.
Both are a lot of tedious work if the group has lots of messages.
