Yahoo Trouble: What to Do

Lately I've heard of a lot of AB/DL Yahoo groups being shut down. (Again.) Yahoo's suits have gotten the idea into their heads that AB/DL stuff is somehow inextricably linked with child molestation or some such rubbish. So as soon as anybody complains about a Yahoo group and their sysadmins look at it and find out it's about adult babies or diaper fetish, the policy is: don't ask questions, shut it down.

Why? With corporations, I've learned that the answer to most "why" questions is "money." I think Yahoo makes most of its money from advertising. It's their lifeline. If I were them, I would be constantly looking for anything that might jeopardize my meal ticket. Like, say, advertisers who might mentally connect AB/DL topics with pedophilia, and might pull their ads if they discover that those ads might appear on these AB/DL people's groups. And Yahoo's not exactly all broken up about summarily deleting groups that advertisers aren't likely (in their minds) to want their ads to appear on if they knew about them, because those groups wouldn't be making Yahoo any, you guessed it, money.

So hey. Here's how to get any AB/DL Yahoo group shut down, if you're the kind of horrible person who would do such a thing. Send the Yahoo admins email and complain about the group. You don't even have to claim there's kiddy porn there. Just get them to look at the group. And bang, deleted, no appeals, no notification, no chance to tell the former subscribers how to contact you or what you're planning to do about this. Archived messages, saved links and files, all gone with no explanation. They might delete the Yahoo profile of the group's owner just for good measure. They're not getting email at that address anymore!

Now I have two Yahoo groups that I own, one that's about my web page in particular and one that's about the Indianapolis AB/DL munch. And I've probably increased the likelihood that they'll get shut down by just telling everybody exactly how to go about it. (Though both groups have weathered a previous wave of Yahoo mass deletions in the past.) Well, here's what I'm going to do about it.

Here are some email addresses to save. If my "LilJennie" Yahoo group goes down, email abtalk-request@liljennie.com and ask to be put on the "abtalk" mailing list. Likewise, if you're on the "HoosierHighChair" Yahoo group about the Indianapolis munch and it goes down, send to hhc-request@liljennie.com and ask to be put on the "hhc" mailing list. It's low-tech, it doesn't let people add and remove themselves, and it doesn't have calendars and files sections and all of that good stuff, but it's also run by me, not by some corporate suits who pledge allegiance to the dollar. And my email address is easy to remember, so you might want to save it in your address book now, before my Yahoo address disappears.

I hope I'm just being paranoid, but at least I have a plan, just in case. Those email addresses now exist and forward things to me, so if everything went down tomorrow we'd be ready. But hey, if nothing happens to my two groups, I'll just be happy and let things stay the way they are.