Yahoo Groups (the operator of this email list and resource) is partly shutting down today, Monday, October 28, 2019. As of this date, the website is scheduled to start becoming non-responsive and users will no longer be able to upload FILES to the FILES area. The incredible history of older emails, which probably represents a bazillion hours of advanced engineering, literally a priceless archive, will start to become inaccessible. An article about what is happening is here: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-save-and-migrate-your-yahoo-groups-data-before-i-1839172243
We will have a few more days to try to grab the contents of the group off the web so we can preserve the priceless resources buried in its history. The entire database is scheduled to be DELETED on December 14, 2019. However, 3rd parties are asking that to save the data in the FILES sections and other data that submissions should be made by DECEMBER 1 or else data in the groups will be lost.
ADMINISTRATORS of the groups can port the data from their groups over by signing up with groups.io which is a website created by the founder of egroups, which is essentially the founding website for Yahoo Groups. Sign up here to get your transfer request in, and do it by December 1, 2019. There is some indication that the photos in the archives or FILES areas may already be going bad as I write.
If you are an administrator of this group and you can’t face this issue because you have moved on in life or have other pressing demands and can’t do it right away, I guess I will volunteer myself to help if you want. What you do is to add me (or some other trusted person) to be administrator of this group and that person can try to handle the transfer, following the instructions at https://groups.io/yahootransfer . If we cannot track down all the administrator of this and the related groups, it sounds like the only other option is for somebody to laboriously download the data themselves manually, which may be an impossible task. So it is with some urgency for us to waken the administrators who may have gone dormant. I have all the emails going back for all related groups to 1994 on my hard drive, but probably not in a form that is practical for me to restore to the community in a reasonable amount of time. Accordingly, there is some urgency for us to get the administrators going on this and to notify us publically that they are on the case.
If you are reading this and are of an independent sort, you can also try to protect yourself by going to the FILES area of some or all of the groups and try to download what is there onto your hard drive and then maybe we can find a venue online to re-upload the content. I noticed that there is also some other efforts to make export tools, such as on GITHUB.
Note that the email functionality of these groups will not stop working, but the web interface, and content search functionality will stop working and the FILES and PHOTOS will be deleted.
Related affected major groups with outstanding archives include the list below. Of these, I am administrator only of the first group, so I am going to try to groups.io/yahootransfer process now.
EZ30D
Ig_syncro16
limbolist
lowrheiner
subaru_vw_swaps
Subaru-Tech
subaruvanagon
Syncro
Syncro_T3_Australia
Syncro16
syncrolist
SyncroSA
SyncroSafari
SyncroWC
TDI-conversion
vanagon
Vanagon_Diesel
Vanagon-VAG-EngConv
Vanagon-Westfalia
vanagonzetec
VW_SYNCRO_QUEBEC
vwbusclub
vwbussyncro
wetwesties
wolfsburg_campers