Fate of the Yahoo message boards?

[Donkey Hotey]

With the sad passing of Jumper, it’s probably time to think about picking up some of his work. One of those has been maintaining the Yahoo EH message boards. At least two of them were owned by him and others have been overtaken with spam over the years.

While I much prefer this forum to the outdated mail list format used by Yahoo, the fact remains that there is a lot of legacy information stored out there.

I just took it upon myself to message the Yahoo administrators and explain the situation with Jumper’s passing.  I have volunteered to take over his role on those boards in the absence of anybody else already being next in line.

So if I stepped on anyone’s toes and you get a message from Yahoo, that’s what’s going on. No internal mutiny intended or implied. It’s been nearly a month and this is about the time he’d send out some message to bump the forum and it reminded me to do something about it. 

[wytfut]

Greg....
     I'm tickled you volunteered to help out. You are definitely qualified to handle it. X smarts, credible, communication skills. I do know as you have stated that you don't have a lot of time in long stretches.
     I don't know of any motions from the Executive board at this time even recognizing this absence. 
     The Yahoo site (excelsiorhendersonresourceboard) has a ton of data, although hard to retrieve (for me, computer lacking).....   but it is there. A lot of the community used that site for years. I myself do feel that it is still a needed site.
     For what ever reason a lot of members use this site or the yahoo site.... not a lot of folks that cross over. I tend to believe that there are a lot of owners that never ever post and monitor both sites.

     Quite a bit of involvement on the facebook page, but not much technical discussion. Mostly events, and "for sale".

     As usual my concerns are for the new X owners that have no idea that we are out there, and how to hook up with us.

     thanx for jumping in buddy,
Bruce

[Donkey Hotey]

Trying to keep this as public as possible, these are the non-club related Super X boards that I could find. When I say non-club, there were a few that were set up by regional owners as general chit-chat discussion areas, separate from the tech info in the others.

Man, it's hard to believe there were so many. Remember all the in-fighting back in those days?

I believe Jumper owned these:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Excelsior-Henderson-Resource-Board/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/excelsiorhendersonsaleboard/info

These, I don't know:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/excelsiorhendersonmotorcycle/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Excelsior-Henderson-Road-Crew/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ExcelsiorHenderson-Graphics-Photos-Art/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/excelsiorhendersonmotorcycle/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/superxownersforum/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/super_xperts/info
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/EHimprovements/info

I got a reply from Yahoo support and the process will begin shortly for the Resource Board. Apparently, it involves posting a public poll and voting by the members. Now if we can just get the privilege turned on to post polls.

[wytfut]

EH improvements and Graphics/photos I'm pretty sure were Simpsons creations. I believe his first name was John, and he hid mostly under his Wifes email address.
Good guy, as I had communicated a lot with him. Lives in florida, and had medical issues due to Vietnam?
He also built the red hot chilli pepper, ... which was tagented "redwood"

anyway..... hes been out of the picture many years.
Those 2 sites have any good Data that can be salvaged?

In the mean time, I'll do a generic facebook announcement. maybe we'll get somebody interested in helping...

Tomorrow I leave for our annual family trip to colorado, and there is no cell service availible where we go, just in case you don't hear from me in any extended period.....

[Donkey Hotey]

Okay, looks like it’s the end of the line for the Yahoo message boards. So much history and information is about to be lost forever.

From Yahoo:
Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site. Beginning October 21, you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded.

[wytfut]

Wow.....
I have heard the past, had made several threats of shutting down this site.
As it was considered passe, in their eyes, even though we had a huge source of info there.

I'll pass it on to Facebook....

[Donkey Hotey]

I’m certainly one who felt this was a nicer, better place to use than Yahoo. We have much more options here for posting ride reports, technical information with pictures, etc.

Of course I considered the Yahoo stuff to be the Dead Sea scrolls of our past. This is not the only community I belonged to on there that will be losing all of their historic servicing information.

The people wanting photos of Jumper had better get into those photo albums and save them. There are other old albums in there that may be of interest to people.

Facebook is cute for sharing pictures or occasional stories but as a technical resource, it’s a disaster.

[rt66john]

Wow.....
I have heard the past, had made several threats of shutting down this site.
As it was considered passe, in their eyes, even though we had a huge source of info there.

I'll pass it on to Facebook....

Another factor for this website is cost.  Registering the domain name (ie www.excelsiorhenderson.com) costs money each year.  Maintaining this website with a good webmaster costs as a yearly or monthly fee.  The owner of the website also has to pay for space on a web hosting company's servers, though that might be wrapped into the cost of a webmaster's fees.  As we're not a big community by any web standard, sometimes the space cost can increase as content (especially media files like photos) increases.

All of what I mentioned above is just to maintain a website that's been built already.  Initial website creation can and does cost thousands of dollars.

This is all on top of the initial cost for developing the website in the beginning.

[bobbybhb]

It was a sad day to see the Yahoo sites lose their data and tech. I watch the EH site along with the Royal Enfield Interceptor and Matchless Sites. Progress, so they say. I hope all the files are located. If not I can put you in touch with the other boards to see how they managed. Cheers

[Donkey Hotey]

Yes, there was a lot of tech and discussions on those forums. I don't even know what happened to some of them. Totally lost to time. I knew I had posts from before my purchase and they could not be found.

Did you ever post on those forums? I saw your question about the V92 owners and comparisons over on Bookface. Mike Degrood is the guy to ask. He currently owns and works on both. He posts here as well as over there.

Also: I saw that another post you did here a few days ago got chopped short. There's a bug on the forum here that does that occasionally and we're trying to recreate it so it can be fixed. In the meantime, I copy all the text I'm about to post in case that happens, then I hit the POST button. If it's missing anything, I can modify the post and paste the entirety of the text back over it and save. That takes care of it.

[bobbybhb]

Yes I posted on the Yahoo site for EH and others. I remember the Deadwood with the carb conversion making quite a stir. Thanks for the tips.