Yahoo Groups (Fandom) Rescue Project

We've got some great taggers at work, but we still need far more to finish. If you're interested in seeing it get done, please consider tagging a tab if you haven't already. Joining the Discord server and following the instructions is the easiest way to do it, but you can also PM me here, message me on IRC's Hackint network (find me in #yahoosucks), or even message me on Reddit (Doranwen there as well).

If you can't tag a tab, maybe you can post the boost text from this post somewhere to get more eyes on it? Or just point people to this comm and say "hey, they could really use some help"? :)

If you know of anyone who might enjoy working on one of the smaller languages, that would be great as well. Many of the single tabs have only a handful of groups on them, making it a fairly easy and quick job for a native speaker. We're happy to help them get started!


Actual stats:

Now up to 3.73% tagged.

Available tabs (sorted by descending numbers by language):

English: 3219
Unknown: 544
Spanish: 388
Portuguese: 336
French: 146
Indonesian/Malay: 131
Italian: 89
German: 77
Turkish: 64
Chinese: 59
Arabic: 54
Romanian: 36
Spam: 32
Persian: 16
Dutch: 12
Filipino: 12
Swedish: 8
Hungarian: 7
Polish: 7
Vietnamese: 6
Bosnian: 3
Finnish: 3
Catalan: 2
Danish: 2
Esperanto: 2
Lithuanian: 2
Norwegian: 2
Russian: 2

Single tabs available:
African: Afrikaans, Chichewa, Hausa, Kinyarwanda, Malagasy, Somali, Swahili, Yoruba
Asian: Acehnese, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Batak Toba, Bengali, Georgian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi/Urdu, Javanese, Kannada, Kapampangan, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Sundanese, Tamil, Telugu, Tetum, Thai, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uyghur
European: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Galician, Greek, Icelandic, Ido, Interlingua, Latin, Latvian, Maltese, Occitan, Slovak, Slovenian, Welsh

All compilation tabs are still available as well.

Note: The "Unknown" groups are by and large not unknown as far as language goes, but they can't be tagged without looking at the actual messages. Most are clearly in English.

The spam tabs will also need to be looked at a little to confirm spam status, but many are in clear patterns and most of the groups won't need to be looked at once one or two are. I have no idea what language, if any, most of those are. My suspicion is that they were created just for email address harvesting, but we may never know for sure.

The metadata sorting is finally done! You have no idea how happy I am to have that part off my plate.

So what's next? Well, for the next week or so you won't see anything here, as I encourage beta taggers to finish up outstanding tabs (and deal with a few tasks of my own that I've been putting off). There are also several main categories that haven't had a thorough testing by beta taggers (Recreation & Sports, Hobbies & Crafts, Health & Wellness, and Schools & Education), so if you've been waiting to help, here's your invitation to pick one of those and try tagging a tab of it.

Once the main categories have been tested, then I'll post a message that you can link to, so you can invite people you know who might be interested in doing this. The more volunteers who help, the sooner this will be done and can be uploaded to the Internet Archive.

The three key things we need in volunteers (besides the time to complete the task) are:

• carefulness / attention to detail


• a willingness to ask questions when in any doubt

and


• the ability to use Google Sheets / Docs at a basic level.

Specialty knowledge in an area (including being able to read another language) is a bonus but not necessary. Discord is the easiest way to connect with us but Dreamwidth PMs, Google Chat, or even IRC can work instead if need be.

Actual stats:

Now up to 2.89% tagged.

Available tabs (sorted by descending numbers by language):

English: 3264
Unknown: 544
Spanish: 389
Portuguese: 336
French: 146
Indonesian/Malay: 131
Italian: 89
German: 77
Turkish: 64
Chinese: 59
Arabic: 54
Romanian: 36
Spam: 32
Persian: 16
Dutch: 12
Filipino: 12
Swedish: 8
Hungarian: 7
Polish: 7
Vietnamese: 6
Bosnian: 3
Finnish: 3
Catalan: 2
Danish: 2
Esperanto: 2
Lithuanian: 2
Norwegian: 2
Russian: 2


Besides the list of available tabs above, we have one tab each (often well under 100 groups - many don't even have 10!) of the following languages:

African: Afrikaans, Chichewa, Hausa, Kinyarwanda, Malagasy, Somali, Swahili, Yoruba
Asian: Acehnese, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Batak Toba, Bengali, Georgian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi/Urdu, Javanese, Kannada, Kapampangan, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Sundanese, Tamil, Telugu, Tetum, Thai, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uyghur
European: Albanian, Basque, Breton, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Galician, Greek, Icelandic, Ido, Interlingua, Latin, Latvian, Maltese, Occitan, Slovak, Slovenian, Welsh


There are also special compilation tabs with one or two groups each of a variety of lesser-used languages, one for each of African, Asian, European, North American, Oceania, and South America. These tabs are very small, all being 20 groups or fewer.

Of special notice is a tab of around 200 groups from this family of languages (Zo, Tedim, Hakha, Mara, etc.). If you know of anyone who can read any of these, please put them in contact with us! Google Translate can only recognize and understand Mizo and the rest must be manually identified (a very difficult task for someone who doesn't speak or read any of them). Translating them is next to impossible. (Some don't even have dictionaries available online.)

I'm continuing to sort jumbled categories—mostly English, with patches of Spanish and the occasional Chinese category. I've hit quite a few categories for fanfic for specific fandoms as well as categories for fanfic for broad media types (TV shows, movies, comics & animation, music artists, etc.).

I've also hit the German categories, which are very easy to sort, as they have little to pull off (a little English, a little other languages, a little Unknown - but very, very little). I've sorted all of the German categories that were in order and am currently going through the jumbled ones they added afterwards.


Actual stats:

Now up to 85.00% sorted and 2.89% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 3254
Spanish: 388
Portuguese: 14
Italian: 88
German: 61
French: 8
Chinese: 59
Indonesian/Malay: 130
Arabic: 54
Persian: 16
Turkish: 63
Romanian: 35
Unknown: 279
Spam: 31


Something fun:

The group "dr202" was just one of many that offered manuals or other downloads for keyboards (at least some of which may be the only places such files can be found anymore):

Information, Mods, Patches, pictures, manuals etc. A place for people to post information regarding electronic instruments. sh-32, dw8000, dx200, an200, dr202, sk-1, theremin, arp, yamaha, korg, moog, casio, ANYTHING! :)

I've continued sorting through jumbles of categories - mostly English, with the occasional Spanish or Chinese category thrown in. (Oddly enough, I can't remember seeing any Italian categories mixed in - perhaps they'd planned enough room in the categoryid numbers to fit them all in before the English ones began?) I've been seeing lots of actors and music artists, quite a few movies and TV shows, random nonfandom categories that hadn't been created originally, and role playing categories for various fandoms that were created either after the fact or at the same time as the category for the fandom.

Found more new languages—Konkani and Gilbertese!


Actual stats:

Now up to 75.00% sorted and 2.71% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 2920
Spanish: 315
Portuguese: 12
Italian: 88
German: 5
French: 7
Chinese: 44
Indonesian/Malay: 119
Arabic: 49
Persian: 15
Turkish: 57
Romanian: 34
Unknown: 228
Spam: 30


Something fun:

For anyone who loves fonts, the group "fontmaniacs" sounded like fun:

If you're one of those crazy folks who spends hours on the web and in newsgroups searching for more and more and more wonderfully diverse ways of making letters on paper, then this club is for you. Come here to trade fonts, talk about creating them, or just talk about collecting them.

The last batch had me sorting through Spanish categories for Business & Finance, Computers & Internet, and Arts & Entertainment. This batch had the Spanish equivalents of Music, more Arts & Entertainment, Family & Home, Games, Government & Politics, Health, Hobbies & Crafts, Sports & Recreation, Religion & Beliefs, Schools & Education, Science, and Romance & Relationships (which definitely had some explicit content). And then it went back to jumbled English categories (with the rare Spanish one), with lots of blocks of regional categories on various topics, as well as sets of categories by letter for movies and for TV shows.

I found some new languages—Aymara, Occitan, Waray, and something I couldn't identify whatsoever. If anyone knows what language this is in, let me know!

FREECOM - Kayuttuq ulsa Ulinda karg Seesco irfdy FREE COMMUNICATING WORLD!
Asklad i fardad um in!

It was in an Australian cultural category, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has anything to do with Australia, given the high percentage of groups that were miscategorized.


Actual stats:

Now up to 65.00% sorted and 2.67% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 2491
Spanish: 286
Portuguese: 10
Italian: 87
German: 4
French: 6
Chinese: 8
Indonesian/Malay: 107
Arabic: 44
Persian: 13
Turkish: 50
Romanian: 31
Unknown: 189
Spam: 30


Something fun:

As an LOTR fan, the group "ainulindale" sounds absolutely fascinating:

Esta lista pretende ser una herramienta de trabajo para la creación de un corpus de música tolkienista, así como creaciónn en danzas tradicionales o medievales.

I'm still wading through a wild variety of categories, many highly specific. There was, for instance, a category under Star Wars/Characters that was just for Chewbacca. Mostly, however, this batch was a lot of categories under Regional, for subcategories along various lines such as Cultures & Community, Religion & Beliefs, Government & Politics, or Schools & Education. There were also large numbers of small categories under Business & Finance, automotive makes, music artists, and actors, as well as various fandoms that must have had their categories created later.

I also found a couple new languages—Nepali and Chuukese! And a couple new spam types in the /Government & Politics/Intelligence/ category (less interesting, lol).


Actual stats:

Now up to 55.01% sorted and 2.65% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 2228
Spanish: 32
Portuguese: 10
Italian: 87
German: 4
French: 6
Chinese: 8
Indonesian/Malay: 99
Arabic: 42
Persian: 13
Turkish: 48
Romanian: 30
Unknown: 173
Spam: 30


Something fun:

Someone who was old enough to have a typewriter (or who have parents who did) may find the group "ibmselectrics" interesting:

Finally!! A place where people can worship, complain, and just plain mingle about the machine that hogged 75% of the typewriter market at one time, the one and only, IBM Selectric!

This update has been a bit slow in coming, mainly due to life busyness. However, I at least finally finished sorting through Schools & Education groups, have sorted through Science groups, and then waded through Romance & Relationships (which had an inordinate amount of porn, naturally). The Romance & Relationships/Adult category, in particular, had approximately a 2:1 ratio of porn to non-porn, the latter being a mix of alternative lifestyle groups, fandom groups (which might have explicit fanfic or fanart), and random other groups that somehow ended up in there (such as a Nigerian ladies' golf association group!). Unfortunately, not all of the non-porn groups were saved, but at least a decent number were, mainly the fandom ones.

The Romance & Relationships/Romance category was possibly the most tedious so far of all categories, because not only did I have to pull off at least two to three times the number of groups that got to stay on the sheet I worked off (so much Unknown, porny Unknown, and Arabic, plus a good number with encoding issues), I couldn't tell apart many of those types from a quick scan due to the sheer quantity of HTML tags present. I frequently had to double-click to expand the description in order to tell if it was purely Unknown, if there was Arabic script or encoding symbols, etc.

Given that, I was relieved to finally finish the Romance & Relationships categories and move on to all the categories that Yahoo created after the fact. When put in sequential order, the earlier categoryid numbers belonged to categories who, next to each other, were all related under the same main category. However, Yahoo's people in charge of Groups clearly realized after creating them that more categories were needed. Suddenly the categories are in smaller blocks - occasionally a stretch of 10 or 20 related categories, but often just one or two categories, completely isolated from anything else related. It's meant a lot more variety in sorting, which is delightful after the tedium of Schools & Education and Romance & Relationships. I even found a group in a new language—Tongan.

I also discovered a new type of spam group - found only in the Schools & Education/Other category so far. The groups have a 5-14 character keysmash (including digits) type name and summary, and a description that reads "Dont know anything". I find it somewhat ironic that such a description is found in a spam group type that's only in a Schools & Education category…


Actual stats:

Now up to 45.06% sorted and 1.75% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 1803
Spanish: 26
Portuguese: 15
Italian: 86
German: 3
French: 4
Chinese: 8
Indonesian/Malay: 75
Arabic: 37
Persian: 11
Turkish: 38
Romanian: 27
Unknown: 144
Spam: 22


Something fun:

The group "MEDTC-DISCUSS" looked a bit out of place in the Teaching and Methods category, but would almost certainly be of interest to someone…

This is a moderated discussion group about publications and other resources on medieval and early modern clothing, dress accessories, and textiles (including tools and processes).

Selections specifically concern clothing and textiles as a subset of material culture (not furniture or pottery, for example). Time and place focus is Europe and the Mediterranean, approximately 500 to 1600 CE. Emphasis is on scholarly and academic work, as opposed to "craft" or theatrical resources. Works under discussion include monographs, journal articles, theses, archaeology reports, and other published (and unpublished) resources, in any language, as well as events such as symposia, conferences, and museum exhibits substantially devoted to clothing and textiles of this period. Posts may be in any language, though English is preferred.

Membership requires moderator permission. Spam will not be tolerated. List members are invited to send notifications of any sources that they have encountered. Active scholars are encouraged to send announcements of their own publications and presentations. Please keep posts on-topic; discussion of personal projects (other than publications), reproduction techniques, supplies, social or re-enactment events, etc. should be taken to more appropriate fora.

This is NOT a SCA or reenactment list but that of academia. References to reenactment organizations... and one's membership in them... are strongly discouraged.

It's been a busy few weeks! First I sorted through hobbies & craft groups, everything from collecting autographs to soapmaking to model trains to ham radio to knitting. Then I sorted categories of groups related to various issues and causes, from human rights to the environment to community service/volunteering. Then it was sports and outdoor hobbies - cars, hiking, baseball, soccer/football, etc. After that it was a whole lot of religion & belief-related groups - atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and much more. I still have more religion & belief categories to sort through before I'm done with them.

Being out of the cultural categories, I'm not encountering many new languages (only Yiddish this time), though the religious categories had the occasional language which I've seen fewer than ten groups for.



Actual stats:

Now up to 35.07% sorted and 1.52% tagged. (Yay for being over 1/3 done with the metadata sorting now!)

Available tabs:

English: 1409
Spanish: 20
Portuguese: 10
Italian: 86
German: 2
French: 4
Chinese: 7
Indonesian/Malay: 46
Arabic: 27
Persian: 9
Turkish: 25
Romanian: 10
Unknown: 101
Spam: 20



Something fun:

There was a group called "potatocannons", with the following description:

This is a club for all you potato projectile loving people. This club is dedicated to the furtherment of potato cannon science.

Lately I've sorted through lots of genealogy groups, family groups, recipe groups, pet-focused groups (so many dog breeds, lol), and heaps more cultural/language groups… It's been particularly slow going due to those, as they required a lot more scrutiny to tag and sort the languages properly. It was a relief to start into the games.

New languages I've found groups in are Ilocano, Chichewa, Uyghur, Kapampangan, Aragonese, Dakota, Hmong, Igbo, Malagasy, Soninke, Jingpho, Maltese, Kazakh, Northern Kankanaey, and Fulani, as well as several individual conlangs/auxlangs. (And maybe you'd count the groups for studying Old English, Pennsylvania Dutch, Papiamento, Cherokee, or Kristang, or the one dedicated to trying to revive a version of Phoenician, of all things!)

Next up are a whole lot of categories for games, mainly computer & video games. I just finished sorting the general category for them and spotted so many Sims and Freedom Force groups! It will be interesting to see what there is in the smaller, more specific categories (such as 3D gaming or various genres).


Actual stats:

Now up to 25.10% sorted and 1.33% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 939
Spanish: 16
Portuguese: 7
Italian: 84
German: 2
French: 3
Chinese: 7
Indonesian/Malay: 34
Arabic: 20
Persian: 8
Turkish: 17
Romanian: 7
Unknown: 88
Spam: 12


Something fun:

An interesting group for a very niche interest, this is the description for the group "non_current_German":

This is a group for specialists -- translators; scholars, academics, and graduate students in various fields; and professional genealogists, among others -- who translate or work with non-current (18th- to 20th-century) German, including old handwritten or typed letters and diaries, printed documents, and historical or literary material of all sorts. Its purpose is to pool members' expertise and resources in terminology, regional terms and variants, non-standard grammar, official jargon, social and cultural conventions, and other elements that make a given text difficult to convey in English.
Guidelines for posting:
1. Queries must provide context. This should include:
* At least the sentence in which the word being queried;
* A description of the document in terms of approximate date, type of text, provenance, and anything else that would point list members in the right direction or provide clues, including your own hunches, reasons for rejecting the obvious, etc. Be explicit!
2. Any resources consulted, including published works, Web sites, and experts should be cited (title, URL, etc). This way we can all expand our knowledge of what is out there. Do some homework before querying the list.
3. All responses should be cited (title, URL, etc.; for the same reasons as in 2.).
4. Do not send in guesses, unless they are based on sufficiently solid experience. If you must send a guess, send it to the querier, not to the list.
5. Please don't send "thank-yous" to the list -- they should go to the person answering the query. If we see that a response is going to be helpful, let us all say a private "thank you."

The title sounds more grand than it really is, but I figure I ought to let people know how it's progressing every so often, and my previous updates were posted only to my personal journal at first and later reposted here.


Possibly-helpful explanation:

When I talk about "sorting metadata", it really means that I am pulling blocks of groups at a time, just names, creation dates, descriptions, and a couple other useful fields (because they had user-created text in them), and putting them on tabs in a spreadsheet. Then I move all the rows off that have group descriptions in a language other than English (moving them to the correct tab for their language), which are pure spam, which have encoding errors meaning the description will need an extra step of fixing it before it can be tagged, and any group which needs a volunteer looking in the messages themselves in order to tag content and/or language. Some categories are quick to sort because there is little to pull off, but others are cluttered with non-English and/or spam and take some time to get them all to the appropriate spreadsheet.

Once the blocks of groups (taken from one or more Yahoo categories, depending on size) are sorted through, the remaining groups can be split into tabs of ~200 groups apiece, and made available for volunteers to tag. Currently I'm going through English categories, but which language is kept vs. removed will naturally shift when I get to categories for Spanish or German, for instance.

Once all of the metadata has been fully sorted, then the tabs for all the smaller languages will be made available, and the tagging will move from beta status to "come one, come all". :)

I've just finished sorting a category for DJs, and will next be sorting through a lot of categories for various music artists and genres.


Actual stats:

Now up to 15.24% sorted and 1.09% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 514
Spanish: 12
Portuguese: 5
Italian: 83
German: 1
French: 1
Chinese: 1
Indonesian/Malay: 26
Arabic: 14
Persian: 5
Turkish: 12
Romanian: 3
Unknown: 53
Spam: 4


Something fun:

And a sample of one of the group descriptions that I thought intriguing, for the group "ethelsmith":

This site is dedicated to the memory and the music of the legendary organist Ethel Smith. Through her films, Hammond organ arrangements, personal appearances and over 25 albums for Decca Records, Miss Smith was a driving force in introducing the Hammond organ to the world over 50 years ago. Her music publishing company produced literally hundred’s of Hammond arrangements, and one of the first instructional courses for the Hammond. This site has become a virtual museum of her record covers, movie posters, sheet music and music book covers. There is no other place on the web that contains more pictures and information on the incredible Ethel Smith. We hope your time here is interesting, informative, and fun. To check out details of Miss Smith’s film career, simply hit in message number 11, 12, and 13. Also check out the MP3 files of some of her hottest recordings. We welcome member’s contributions, especially personal stories and photos.