Yahoo announced on Wednesday, Oct. 16, that it has decided to drastically limit the features of long-lasting Yahoo Groups website, which launched in 2001.

The company urged users to collect the files they have uploaded on Yahoo Groups before everything is deleted on Dec. 14. Starting Monday, Oct. 28, new content can no longer be uploaded on the online platform.

Yahoo Shutting Down Groups Site

According to the Yahoo announcement post, the website will continue to exist and will not be taken down. Instead, all public groups will turn private or restricted with potential members requiring an invite from a member. While admins can still manage settings and tools of the group, functions will be greatly limited.

For instance, content will no longer be uploaded on the website starting Monday, Oct. 28. Members can share information with each other, but it will be through email.

Existing content on the Yahoo Groups website will be permanently deleted on December. Users who don't want to lose the files they have uploaded on the site have about two months to save everything. All the files and photos can be saved directly from the website and all the data downloaded from the Privacy Dashboard.

Besides the files and photos, a number of features will no longer be part of the Yahoo Groups website, including calendars, polls, links, conversations, databases, attachments, email updates, message digest, and message history.

An End Of An Era

Yahoo Groups was been around for 18 years, having been launched back in 2001. As VICE noted, it was meant to bridge the gap between mailing lists and internet forums as some sort of fusion of the two. In nearly two decades, countless of niche communities have found a home in the Yahoo website.

Back in 2009, Yahoo made a similar move when it shut down its web hosting service GeoCities. Roughly 7 million personal websites shut down along with the service, which archivists criticized Yahoo for at the time. Last year, Yahoo also shut down Yahoo Messenger.

While Yahoo is not completely shutting down Yahoo Groups for now, it may only be a matter of time until the company opts to do so.

Some of the content may be preserved in the Internet Archives, according to archivist Jason Scott, but these will no longer be functional and simply be snapshots.

Of COURSE Archive Team is going to go after it. We will take a huge-ass snapshot, and people will lose ALL the functionality of access, search, reference. That's the price that's paid - we turn things into snapshots instead of reference books and living things. — Jason Scott (@textfiles) October 16, 2019