Yahoo! Answers

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Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers logo
YahooAnswersHomepage.png
URL https://answers.yahoo.com/
Status Offline
Archiving status 2021: Partially saved
2016: Partially saved
Archiving type Unknown
Project source yahooanswers-grab
Project tracker 2021: yahooanswers2
2016: yahooanswers
IRC channel #noanswers (on hackint)
Data[how to use] archiveteam_yahooanswers

Yahoo! Answers is currently the biggest Q&A site on the internet. It is unlikely to go down soon, but given Yahoo!'s record of deleting sites (Yahoo! Messages, Ask Yahoo!), one would be better off using Answers.com or another Q&A site. Closed on 2021-05-04.

In July 2016, Yahoo! has been acquired by Verizon. Rumour has it that Answers might be closed as a consequence. So ArchiveTeam decided to download it. This effort stopped in July 2017 for unknown reasons.

In April 2021, Yahoo! announced that Answers would go read-only on 2021-04-20 and be shut down entirely on 2021-05-04.[1] As expected, Yahoo! added a pop-up notice 2021-04-20 saying that read-only mode had begun.[2], and on 2021-05-04, the entire website started redirecting to a help article.

Users have received an email notification from Yahoo on the day of the closure stating that they can still download their individual data until June 30, 2021.

2021 Archival attempt

Archiving finished! Participants were given instructions on how to install the ArchiveTeam Warrior to help out and and recommended to join the IRC channel for up-to-date information. In the end, a complete capture was not possible, so it is very likely that not all pages were archived.

Docker image: atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/yahooanswers-grab, see the setup instructions in Running Archive Team Projects with Docker for more details.

Outlinks were passed to the URLs project. To handle pagination, URLs that look like '<subdomain>.answers.yahoo.com/_reservice_/' were called. Since this was done on many pages, it showed up frequently in the logs.

2016/2017 Archival attempt

Discovery

[1] and [2] are allegedly the oldest accounts on the site.

User:PurpleSymphony did a discovery in July–August 2016, on which the ArchiveTeam project is based.