Yahoo Groups migration status

[Dan Casali]

As of today (11/12/2020), the Yahoo Group continues to function and all content remains online. On December 14th, Yahoo has stated that all content will be removed from the web interface. Our goal is to have the forums up and running for postings by that date. Whether the prior group content is also online at that date is not entirely in our control, but if not it will follow expeditiously.

User registration (and thus posting) at the forums will be disabled until we firm up the forum structure with your help. I don't want to deal with preserving real content as we shuffle our forums into final form. My goal is to open up registration not later than December 14th.

We have secured copies of all 20+ years postings, along with all photos and attachments that were on the Yahoo site. We are awaiting completion of importing modules that will allow us to bring the posting into our new forums. Hopefully, prior "conversations" (emails that share a common subject) will be converted into "topics" in the forums. It will be up to us to move these topics into the appropriate forum, and this will take a good deal of time and the effort of forum moderators (volunteers needed).

As you can see from this draft of the forums, we have made progress in bringing the forums online. We hope to integrate the old club web site (fairchildclub.org - which is currently not functional) with the forums, and host the old photo galleries there. There is some administrivia that must be dealt with before that can happen, but it will be resolved.

While we have saved the Yahoo Group membership list of over 600 members by name and email address, it is unclear if we will be able to directly import these members into the forum. Worst case members may need to re-register at the forum. The phpBB software will finally give us the ability to reset passwords directly rather that go through the rather obscure Yahoo process, and there will be no need to have any registration with Yahoo to join.

Our forum software base, phpBB, supports directly attaching images to your posts, a desirable feature, but we have run into a technical issue that is currently interfering with that. We are troubleshooting that issue.

I'll update here and at the group as we progress. Please pass on your suggestions in this forum.

Thanks