Nothing’s forever. While Yahoo has announced
mid-october that it will shut down it’s service on
December 14th, they’re taking the step a bit
further: voluntary archivars aren’t allowed to save…

…the history of the posts made in Yahoo Groups.

Verizon, owner of Yahoo and it’s subsidiaries declared the attempts of the Internet Archive volunteers a violation against the ToS of Yahoo Groups thus making it nearly impossible to get a backup of all the data stored on Yahoo Groups.

Users were informed that the service will be shut down and Yahoo had offered a solution for users to get their data off the platform, however the tool didn’t work as intended and either missed posts, attachments (images, documents and the like) and compressed archives for download often also contained malware.

So while Yahoo is avoiding the successful backup of the Yahoo Groups archive, the main question is, why is Verizon so eager to make backups impossible especially with the service termination date coming quickly?

It once again proves that if you want to keep something online for the public you’re not supposed to leave your intellectual property (as we would describe postings and attached images/documents) with companies that are known for changing their ToS to their advantage.

Yahoo (better say: Verizon) is one such example!

Farewell, Yahoo Groups. May the Internet Archive have backupped most of what is possible to backup!