By kadiera on

I find myself in the position of being the head of a non-profit group started by a bunch of people with no planning skills to speak of, and no technical knowledge. I'm certainly not the world's best when it comes to this stuff, but I know my limits, I know people I can ask for help, and I'm not afraid to jump in and find a solution to problems when I see them.

My current beef is that rather than having someone in the group set up internal mailing lists using our domain name, they set up all their lists as yahoo groups - and there are now over 100 of these lists to manage. Besides the fact that yahoo irritates me, I think it'd be more professional to find an in-house solution.

Our current site uses metadot, but there are access issues, and it doesn't handle the yahoo group problem.

Drupal was recommended to me by several of my more technically minded friends, and I really like what I've seen so far. It looks like the Organic Groups modules would handle the same sorts of things we're using our yahoo groups for. The multi-site option of using the same membership database would be very helpful to me as well, as we have different content available to different membership groups within our organization, and being able to use subdomains for that would be quite nifty.

The one thing I haven't seen yet (and maybe I'm just not searching in a good spot) is a suggestion on how to migrate yahoo groups to a site using Drupal's OG modules. Obviously I can import content in one way or another from the list archives. I can get someone here who's a little better with mySQL to move our existing metadot users to Drupal without killing passwords and such. And I can pull an entire mailing list from each yahoo group...but just adding their email addresses doesn't give them access to the site.

So...is this the sort of thing where I'd have to generate passwords for every person we add? Or is there some other way to do this that I'm missing?

Thanks.

Comments

n4t3’s picture

n4t3 commented

I'm considering a switch to Drupal as well. Our organization has also used Yahoo groups for years and have a boat load of messages that we would be keen to port over somehow. If anyone has any ideas on this front, I'd be interested as well.

WebWeasel’s picture

WebWeasel commented

I too have a couple of Yahoo Groups to convert. I've been able to get users imported using the user_import module. You have to pull the CVS version but it worked fine for me. You just need format your list of users as a CSV file. I also have used node_import (also from CVS *sigh*) and it works for importing content. node_import allows you to define the type of node you need to import in a small PHP file that's pretty easy to create.

I have a script that used to be able to pull the Yahoo Groups messages via screen scraping but Yahoo made some changes a while back that broke it. I suspect you could find a working script with a bit of googling. I had one that did files too but I doubt it works either.

Unfortunatly, Yahoo Groups does not have an API so all scripts are pretty much limited to screen scraping.

rsutaria’s picture

rsutaria commented

We have just finished a massive yahoogroups migration to Drupal. We imported over 200K yahoo messages spread over a 4 year period and have them imported into drupal as threaded forum topics.

If someone needs help doing that, we would be happy to help in any suitable way that we can.

Thanks

felipe’s picture

felipe commented

Hi, can you roughly tell us the modules / thecnique you used?

Thank you

pollard.tom’s picture

pollard.tom commented

I'm faced with the same problem. Recently, I discovered a perl script that can extract messages out of Yahoo! Groups and used it to download 2900+ messages from our group. The script is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/grabyahoogroup/

I had to hack it a little bit to make it work - I think Yahoo must have changed a few things about how their site works since the current version of the script was created. But, once I got it going, I was able to start it up and then come back a couple hours later to find my 2900+ messages sitting in the download directory. (very sweet!) Now I need to figure out how to import them into Mailman or into a Drupal forum...

Tom