Migrate to forums.group

Migrate your Yahoo Group to

As Yahoo Groups owners ourselves, we understand the stress and confusion brought about by Verizon's decision to delete the Yahoo Group archives in December 2019 and has now deleted the service entirely on December 15. 2020. ALL previously posted content on the site was permanently removed in 2019 and the remaining email service has now shutdown as well. Now that the online data is gone, it is only possible to help groups that hava already downloaded their data, for example from a download dump from Yahoo. Yahoo Groups is now effectively dead and this has led to a large number of active groups migrating to other platforms, the most popular one is groups.io as they had a full transfer service for $220 that offered a migration service up until December 2019.

Now that YahooGroups is gone, it is now time to move to us, even restore your lost archives and let your group continue on a better more vibrant platform.

What about groups.io?

It is no longer possible to migrate your Yahoo Group to groups.io with your message archives as they are not accepting any more requests. We however can accept orders to transfer your Yahoo Group using data we have already downloaded or from the MBox data obtained from Yahoo to our new Forums.Group platform. After the transfer, your members and message archive will be reunited and discussions can continue on a better phpBB based platform.

What is the catch?

Our services are not free, but certainly worthwhile and future safe and we will not start censoring your posts, provided you respect the laws applicable in Germany, where we are hosted. Once your group has been converted, our promise is that you cannot lose your community again. Even if our service were to fail or close down, it is then an easy job to migrate your forum to any other webserver with no data losses or expensive conversion. The phpBB platform is open source and well supported - the ideal platform to ensure the future of your community.

As we need to perform a lot of manual configuration to setup each forum, we have to charge a setup fee. Orders will be processed in the order they come in so do not delay and order your new forum now.

Here is the procedure to migrate your YahooGroup to Forums.Group

#1 Download the Member List from Yahoo Groups

How to Download the Members List from Yahoo Groups

Step #1: Download the Member List from Yahoo Groups

UPDATE: ACCESS TO THE MEMBERS LIST ON YAHOOGROUPS HAS NOW BEEN REMOVED! We are leaving this online for those that downloaded the data and still need to process it. If you were unable to download the members list, yet have the data download from last year, there is still a chance we can extract at least the email addresses from the emails.

This video explains how to extract the entire member list from Yahoo Groups for transferring to the forums.group platform. Owner or Moderator permissions are required.

This method works with the Google Chrome and Brave browsers, not however with FireFox for example.

Procedure for groups with up to 1000 members for forums.group

This method requires Excel and at least moderator or owner access to the Yahoo Group with the ability to view the members list.
If your computer's regional settings are not set to USA (date format MM/DD/YYYY) on Windows 10, select Start / Settings / Time & Language / Region / Regional Format / English (United States)
Substitute <yourgroup> with the name of your group in the following instructions. e.g. if your YahooGroup is called "FreeDemo", substitute Freedemo where you see <yourgroup>, below.
Go to Management / Manage Members of your Yahoo Group (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/<yourgroup>/members/all)
e.g. if your group name is FreeDemo, then https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreeDemo/members/all
Click on Actions / Export / CSV Format. A download window appears and you need to save this file in a place you can find it again.
Using Windows Explorer, rename the file type from .csv to .prn e.g. rename MemberList.csv to MemberList.prn
Start Microsoft Excel on your computer and then click the Open command, a dialogue window will open
At the bottom right of this box, above the open button, change the file type to "Text Files (*.prn;*.txt:*.csv)" and then select your downloaded MemberList.prn file.
Click on the Open button, the "Text Import Wizard - Step 1 of 3" appears.
Set Delimited, tick My data has headers and change File origin to: "650001 : Unicode (UTF-8)" and click on Next
In Step 2, ensure Comma is ticked and click on Next
In Step 3, click on each column and define the column data format as Text including the final "Joined" column. We have been seeing groups where Yahoo has been displaying a mixture of formats (e.g. some lines displayed as "Feb 18, 2009" and others as "18 Feb, 2009") so just leave this as text so that we can fix this during migration.
Click on Finish and the data is inserted into a new document
Check all the data looks correct and the entire list looks complete. Ignore any mixture of date formats, we will fix that during migration.
File / Save As / Browse / select a place you want to save the file in / Save as type: "Excel Workbook" / File name: MemberList.xlsx and Save.
Submit the file to us to import into your new forum during the ordering process.
If you changed the Locale of your computer in step 2, you can now reset them to your local settings.

Procedure for groups with more than 1000 members for forums.group:

This method requires Excel and Notepad with at least moderator or owner access to the Yahoo Group with the ability to view the members list.
If your computer's regional settings are not set to USA (date format MM/DD/YYYY) on Windows 10, select Start / Settings / Time & Language / Region / Regional Format / English (United States)
Make sure you are using either the Google Chrome or Brave browsers, as other browsers like FireFox will not work correctly.
Substitute <yourgroup> with the name of your group in the following instructions. e.g. if your YahooGroup is called "FreeDemo", substitute Freedemo where you see <yourgroup>, below.
Go to Management / Manage Members of your Yahoo Group (https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/<yourgroup>/members/all)
e.g. if your group name is FreeDemo, then https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FreeDemo/members/all
Using the scroll buttons, keep on scrolling down the list until you get to the bottom of the list. If you have a lot of members, this can take several minutes before the entire list is displayed.
Go back to the top again and starting at "First Name", select the entire list until you get to the bottom (this can take some time, until the entire list has been marked).
When the entire list has been marked this way, right click and copy the selected entries and then past it into an empty Notepad window.
At the top of the list on the second line, mark from the left until "Profile picture" and copy that.
Edit / Replace / make sure that the "Replace with" field is empty and click on the Replace button.
If that worked well, click on the "Replace All" button. to remove that text from the entire list and then close the replace dialog.
On the top row, now insert "Full Name" and press the tab button
In Notepad, File / Save As / Save as type: All Files (*.*) / testgroup.prn (you can alternatively use the name of your group)
It is important to save the text file with the .prn extension, not .txt and also not .prn.txt
Using Microsoft Excel, open the testgroup.prn file and the Text Import Wizard opens on Step 1
Set Delimited, change File origin to: "650001 : Unicode (UTF-8)", tick "My data has headers" and click on Next >
In Step 2, ensure Tab is ticked and click on Next
In Step 3, click on each column and define the column data format as Text including the final "Joined" column. We have been seeing groups where Yahoo has been displaying a mixture of formats (e.g. some lines displayed as "Feb 18, 2009" and others as "18 Feb, 2009") so just leave this as text so that we can fix this during migration.
Click on Finish and the data is inserted into a new document
Check all the data looks correct and the entire list looks complete. Ignore any mixture of date formats, we will fix that during migration.
File / Save As / Browse / select a place you want to save the file in / Save as type: "Excel Workbook" / File name: MemberList.xlsx and Save.
Submit the file to us to import into your new forum during the ordering process.
If you changed the Locale of your computer in step 2, you can now reset them to your local settings.

#2 Find a backup of your Yahoo Groups archives

Step #2: Find a full backup of your YahooGroup archives!

If you do not already have a backup of your YahooGroup by now, it is too late to ask for it from Yahoo. However, as the topic of saving group archives was popular in almost every active group, it is highly likely that one of your members has a copy of the official YahooGroup download (we need the members.zip file) or better still, someone has stored a copy of all the messages in Microsoft Outlook and can export them into a PST-file. If so, they need to create a fresh members.pst file and copy all the messages into it. We can work with both formats so simply ask your group who has a copy. If you have a health-related YahooGroup, it is also possible that our sister website has already archived it. Click here to visit that website and see if your group is listed. If so, you do not have to send us the message files, we already have them. If your group remained active after the archives were deleted, add those additional messages to the PST-file as well.

If all else fails, you can also try the Internet Archive Team, who have been downloading a large number of YahooGroups.

Good Luck finding your archives. Of course, you can still start a forum on our platform without your past archives.

#3: Raise the funds to cover the costs

Step #3: Raise the funds to cover the costs

As we have a significant amount of work to setup a forum and migrate a YahooGroup, it is not possible to setup such a forum for free as we are still a small start-up company. However, we are keeping the costs as low as possible and in most cases, we are still under the price that groups.io charged to migrate YahooGroups when it was still possible.

If the group owner and moderators cannot raise the funds themselves, we suggest asking the members to donate towards the costs. If you order a premium forum, we can activate advertising to help gain the funds needed for the following year.

#4 Start the Create Forum Process

Step #4: Start the Create Forum Process

If for any reason, we are unable to complete the migration process, the fees will be refunded.

You can start the process from our Create forum page.

#5: Send us the downloaded archive file(s)

Step #5: Send us the downloaded archive file(s)

Once you have collected all the files we need, submit them via the ordering process. We need the following files:

Messages.zip from the Yahoo datadump or an Outlook PST file containing all the messages
An Excel file containing all the members data from YahooGroups.
Two suitable images to be used as banners for the new forum: 700 pixel wide for mobile platforms and 1500 pixels wide fro desktop use.
List of forum categories and forum names to be setup on the new forum

You can start the process from our Create forum page where you will find more detailed instructions.

#6 Once all above steps are complete, we will process it

Step #6: Once all above steps are complete, we will process it

Once you have submitted your order and paid the fees, your order is added to the queue to be processed. This can take some time as we have to manually process all the data and perform the migration process. If we get a lot of orders at the same time, orders will be put in a queue in the order we receive them. We will first setup your forum, migrate your messages and members, and then send all your members as invitation to join in the fun - they are already preregistered and simply have to join the forum with the login details we send them.

Note: The free hosting level is basically a phpBB forum where your members will need to get used to reading and posting the messages on the forum website. Posting via email is not possible, but it is possible to send new posts out to members via email. Premium level forums will allow reading, posting and replying via email in a form similar to YahooGroups with minor changes to support the various categories that forums offer.

#7 Learn how to moderate a forums.group

Step #7: Learn how to use and moderate a forums.group

While you are waiting for us to setup your forum (and migrate your data if applicable), we suggest you learn how to moderate a phpBB forum. If you have not been a member of a phpBB based forum before, we strongly suggest you register and join one of our demo forums and practice making posts and familiarizing yourself with using it. Make a few posts, try the various functions, etc.

Please read through the documentation to make yourself familiar with the possibilities. A forum has a lot more features than a YahooGroup and there is a certain learning curve. We are doing all we can to simplify the job and create training videos to explain and demonstrate each aspect of using and moderating a forums.group.

Please note, it is your job as a moderator to support your members with using the forum. We will be assisting by providing training and support to help you learn the job.

User Guide

Updated: December 1, 2020

Mod. Guide

Released: December 1, 2020

Admin Guide

phpBB Website.

Note: Our own Admin Guide

will be released in late Dec.

Online Support

groupmanagers.forums.group

phpBB Website

#8 Tell others about forums.group

Step #8: Tell others about forums.group

The more YahooGroups that migrate to our platform, the better we can scale our service and improve upon it. Please help us by telling everyone you know about our service that has used YahooGroups in the past. We are really excited about building a strong reliable platform that fully respects your freedon of expression into the future. At a time where other social media companies are censoring non-mainstream thinking, we are here to provide this valuable service allowing you to speak your mind without fear of censorship (with the exception of extremist discussions and Holocaust denial, see here for details).

Please tell others about forums.group and suggest they revive their group, here. For every group you recommend that results in a new order and payment is made, we will give you a voucher for $10 towards your group's costs, added features or the yearly subscription. For this to work, the new order needs to name you as a reference.

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