Nov
2
This article was written by Sam Jones, who currently hosts the USS Mark Miller roleplay in UCIP. Sam previously wrote on this topic back in 2016.
Read MoreApr
17
This article was written for us by Sam Jones from the roleplaying game “Chronicles of Gaea”.
As you may or may not have heard, Yahoo! is going through some financial difficulties. This isn’t a huge surprise to those of us who have been using their products for years, but it still is something of concern, especially for the simming community.
Yahoo! Groups has been invaluable (and, even further back, Egroups and ONElist) for play-by-email simming. I, personally, have been using them for fifteen years. They archived everything, so as long as your old sim group wasn’t deleted, all the posts still exist. Permissions issues notwithstanding. Read More
Jul
2
Yesterday I received an email which makes me worried about the future of Yahoo! groups.
Yahoo! Groups have been around for over 10 years, and before that they were called eGroups. This was where I played my first roleplaying game, as Yahoo! Groups was popular with roleplayers as it was free and easy, and allowed users to send emails out to members of the game. This was a proper PBEM (play-by-email) game.
I used a Yahoo Group to run my Blue Dwarf game for 10 years and in that time there were no new advancements made to the system, giving me the impression that Yahoo had abandoned the service, only continuing to run it for legacy purposes. That’s when I moved Blue Dwarf over to OngoingWorlds (If you want to know more about this process, here’s an article I wrote at the time). Read More
Oct
8
Yahoo Groups logo
The first text-based RPG I joined was a Star Trek game, ran in a Yahoo Group. A Yahoo group was an idea medium for the game, as it allowed you to email one address, and the email would be filtered out to every member in the game. It was a true PbEM game, as it all happened by email.
I setup my own PbEM using a Yahoo Group because I was happy with this format. Then over the years, Yahoo changed slightly and allowed you to view the messages on the Yahoo Group pages. It still kept the functionality of being able to submit posts by email, but you could also do it on the web too, which I actually prefer to this day, as submitting it by email just isn’t as reliable and seems to take longer.
