Sidecar Talk Yahoo Groups Knowledgebase - Introduction and Overview

“Yahoo Groups was a free online community platform that allowed users to create discussion forums and communities. It was launched in 2001 and became one of the largest online community platforms.  Yahoo Groups offered email, group directories, homepages, and private messaging.  Users could post messages, polls, photos, events, files, mailing lists, and links to websites. Yahoo announced that the social media platform Yahoo Groups would shut down on December 15, 2020. Yahoo said supporting the platform “no longer fit” with its long-term strategy, citing low use. Yahoo Groups had seen a steady decline in usage over the last several years.” Source: Wikipedia

When I became the Webmaster for the United Sidecar Association (USCA) in June 2022, I read everything I could find on the website to learn about the organization, the people, and the history. 

In the Sidecar forums I saw several references to Yahoo! Groups and the “Sidecar Talk” group. Being a technology guy I knew what Yahoo! Groups was from many years ago so I started researching to learn more and the sidecar group. I found a reference to a collection saved by Claude Stanley and indexed by Bruce Stephens. 

I learned that when Yahoo Groups announced they would be closing down the service Claude figured out how to download all the content from the Yahoo service. He saved it as a series of Word documents with individual posts inside the many files. 

(For those not familiar, Claude has been active in sidecars for many decades. He is the owner of C Stanley Motorsports Corporation and Freedom Sidecars in Pennsylvania. He has about 2500 posts in our forums and the earliest post I have found is from December 2006 which you can read here.) 

I searched various lists and databases and found an email address for Bruce. I sent him an email and waited for a week or two with no response. I was frustrated and disappointed but I knew this was very important and he was the key to this body of knowledge. So one evening I just up and cold-called him at home. 

To my surprise he answered! And he was very apologetic that he had missed my email somehow. I explained who I was and my purpose, and he told me of his background and history with the project. 

He was some kind of a company document manager, if I recall, and was an expert at documenting processes and procedures (sorry if I don’t recall the details, Bruce). He had access to the Yahoo Groups knowledgebase but it was so large it was not useable. So over the winter of 2017-2018 he spent many hours and days, poured through the various documents and messages, and indexed them all one by one!! The knowledgebase covers about 10 years and has thousands of posts (the earliest message I found was dated 9/5/00). The index you see was built entirely by him! An amazing effort!! 

Then it just sat. And forgotten about. Until I called him. 

However, he was very protective of his and Claude’s work and said he couldn’t release the files without the approval of Claude. He said he knew Claude but had not talked to him for many years, so I told him I would try to get his permission. 

So then, a few days later, I cold-called Claude one evening. He answered right away and I explained who I was and the background of the project. We talked for over 2 hours! What an interesting guy!! He remembered Bruce from their interactions many years before. I explained that Bruce wouldn’t release the files without his permission. Claude apparently doesn’t do email or any kind of social media - except Facebook. So I asked him if he would call Bruce directly. 

A few days later Bruce emailed me and said Claude thought it was a good idea for me to have the knowlegebase files for the website. The files were too many and too large to email so we decided to use Dropbox to transfer them. In all there were 171 Word documents!

Once I got the files I could see they were not presentable. They were in the old Word 2000 format and all in large Courier font. They needed some serious reformatting. And how was I going to present them on the website? Our space is limited on our current server and I couldn’t find a way to present them in a webpage efficiently. And with all that content it really needed to be searchable. 

My solution was to import all the documents into Google Drive, Google’s file storage service and editing suite (think Microsoft Office 365 by Google). They give you 15gb of storage for free. (I have been teaching how to use Google Apps at the local college for 10 years.)

Once I got them into the cloud I knew I could use some programming to reformat them. But I don’t know how to code and I didn’t want to pay someone. 

I went to ChatGPT and started asking questions. Through many iterations, I found out how to mass format from Courier New to Arial font. Except the old Word 2000 document format was too old to work with - all the 171 documents needed to be converted to the more modern Word .docx format. So I worked with ChatGPT to build some programs using Google Apps Script to convert all the documents to .docx, and then change the font in them all to Arial. As you might imagine, this took a LOT of time and trial and error. Weeks of continual research and refinement. 

So now all of the documents that hold the thousands of posts reside in the Google cloud and not on our server. Another advantage of having them there is we can use Google Search to find keywords. It is very powerful and fast! 

Now you can open the documents and browse the old posts. But, while entertaining, that will get tedious quickly. A better way is to find a topic you are interested in in the index (“Briefcase”). Then open the related document and search inside (menu ‘edit’, then ‘find’ or just press control F). 

That is the story of what happened to the Yahoo Groups, how Claude rescued them, how Bruce made them useable, and how I brought them to the sidecar community. 

As some famous philosopher once said, “We all stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us.” 

Now go play: Sidecar Talk Yahoo Groups Knowledgebase. 

You can also find a link in the Sidecar Library. 

Jerry M

USCA Webmaster

PS. Forgive me but I am going to lock this post and pin it to the top so it stands alone and is visible to everyone over time. If you want to comment please start a new post that everyone can reply to.