I'm back from holiday and decided to write a script to pull all 11,545 messages that have been posted to this group, to date, into a database. This means we'll still be able to refer back to them when the message history disappears from Yahoo over the next week or so.
It wasn't an easy process as the Yahoo Groups server is painfully slow at the moment (presumably because thousands of other groups are being backed up one way or another by members who don't want them to suddenly vanish either!)
I realize we should still be able to email each other indefinitely but I've always preferred posting my replies using the online forms. I also find it much easier to follow a topic when I can flick back and forth through previous comments rather than searching through a cluttered inbox.
My original idea was to import the group posts into a proper bulletin board but after toying with this for the last few days I've come to accept that it isn't really feasible when you have thousands of posts all formatted differently - some plain text, most in HTML - and lots of them repeating the previous messages beneath them!
In the end I put up a simple page that emulates the way Yahoo currently displays them, so that you can read through them one at a time, if you so desire, but adding in a powerful search function so that you can easily find any message about any topic that has been posted to the group over the last 12 years.
There are a dozen or so "missing" messages - presumably these were spam posts that Dean deleted? Anyway, for those of you interested in viewing the message archive, either now or sometime in the future, you'll find it here:
https://tvrdb.com/jam/group/All the best!
Simon