Brief History of the Minutus YahooGroup

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Peter Walker
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Brief History of the Minutus YahooGroup

Post by Peter Walker »

A member of the Minutus group has been attacking me publicly over my handling of the saving of the Minutus Group archives. After making a personal attack on the Minutus group on groups.io, she has also started to attack me on my own Rife group. While I am not going to name her in this post, I am sure many can guess. In this post, I am simply going to repost my slightly edited answer to those accusations so that everybody knows the facts of the matter.

Brief History of the Minutus YahooGroup Migration
Back in October and November of 2019, when it was well known that YahooGroups was going to remove its archives and lots of groups decided to migrate to groups.io, including this one, with their archives, before it was too late.

I then worked practically 24/7 trying to archive as many health-related YahooGroups as I could so that their archives are not totally lost. In the end, I backed up 70 health-related YahooGroups so that their archives could at least be preserved offline and I used the PG Offline Windows software that already existed to do that. I was literally downloading YahooGroups constantly on two computers simultaneously from October until the groups went offline on December 16. I did not charge any of those groups a penny to preserve their archives and the downloads are available for a few dollars, each in order to help cover my costs. I did not make a profit on that project, all the money earned went to cover the costs of the project, itself. Those archives I made are available to download from this website: https://groups.rifeforum.com 

While archiving those groups, I was of course seeing the posts of each group and provided technical assistance to several groups to migrate to groups.io in time with their archives. Many groups could not afford the $220 fee, groups.io was charging and I discovered it was possible to split this Rifegroup into subgroups and to migrate other groups into the respective subgroups. I successfully migrated Hulda Clark Enthusiasts (https://rifegroup.groups.io/g/huldaclarkenthusiasts) and SymphonicHealth (https://rifegroup.groups.io/g/SymphonicHealth) over to this Rifegroup, thereby saving both groups from extinction and I was aware of a third group that was highly active and had done nothing to save their own group: Minutus – a Classical Homeopathy Group that I did not know anything about before starting the archiving project. I could see from their posts that they were obviously aware of the upcoming loss of their archives, but they did not have anyone with the technical skills to guide them through the process. They also did not have the $220 available to pay for the migration, themselves. As I had already migrated the other two groups, I wrote a message to their group announcing myself and offering assistance to help them migrate to another subgroup of this rifegroup. My message was stuck in moderation for several days, so the group could not hear my comments. I started writing to their members individually and at some point, one of their members mentioned that I was helping other groups to migrate, from a message I had written to another group. By the time they started talking to me, there were just a few days before the archives were due to be removed. It was already past the official deadline to migrate groups, but through my contacts, I knew of a backdoor that would still have permitted the migration to be possible. 

Now you would think that at this late stage, they would have jumped at the chance of having their group migrated at the last moment, but instead they just argued over if this was the right thing to do. I pointed out that in a few days, these discussions would become academic once Yahoo removed the archives. When they finally put me in touch with their moderator, it was already December 15. The moderator (Soroush) was very helpful and gave me his moderator access, but he only had the absolute minimum moderator permissions and it was not enough to start a migration. I then contacted the Iranian owner in Iran via email and phone, but the group was so misconfigured that he could not give me more access, either. After further research and working against the clock, I finally gained full access on December 16 – the same day Yahoo removed the archives. I would have needed 3 days to get the migration through, but all the delays through moderation and then arguing resulted in them missing the boat. If they had seen my initial posts straight away and worked with me, it would have just been possible to fully migrate their group in time. Their archives were now gone, apart from my backup and the possibility to download the Yahoo MBox files, that most people would not have a clue what to do with.

I felt really sorry for this group that had just lost everything and offered my assistance to try and rescue the group.My downloadable archives were available with comfortable Windows software for $8.99, but then one of them started bitching about the price. I remember thinking that if they did not think their archives with 108,352 messages over 20 years were not worth $8.99, why was I wasting my time helping these people?

As I later discovered, “no good deed goes unpunished.”
https://groups.rifeforum.com/minutus.php 

I setup the Minutus group on groups.io, as a subgroup of this Rife Group anyway, with the idea of at least migrating all their members there. That is when I discovered a minor disadvantage of subgroups – You cannot directly add the members of a YahooGroup into a subgroup. That was possible when a group was migrated by groups.io into a subgroup, but not otherwise. The only thing possible was to send invitations to all of the members on Minutus, which I did. Of 3097 members on the YahooGroup, only 108 accepted the invitation and joined the Minutus group on groups.io. The way groups.io works means that all members of the Minutus subgroup are automatically members of this Rife group as well and that is why they are now also posting on my Rife group. Rife and homeopathy are both seen as alternative medicine, even when our methods are very different. All the same, we can learn from each other as well. 

I investigated an upload software written by the same guy that wrote the windows download software I was using. The software was meant to be able to upload the archives I had to groups.io. I obtained a copy of the software and did a dummy run to see if it would work. It was very buggy and they would have lost about half their archives, yet pay a high price for the privilege. I talked with the programmer and tried to get it working, but it was hopeless. He also had a solution for migrating to phpBB forums, but he wanted even more for that and as it used the same conversion system, their archives would have still only been half there. 

I have been working for years with a very capable Polish programmer that had already written special code for the Rife Forum, for example to allow credit card payments. He was specialised in php software development and his pricing had always been acceptable. I explained the problem to him and asked if he could migrate the Minutus group to a phpBB forum. He looked into it and we agreed a price and so I worked with the Minutus group to fund raise to pay for the migration costs. It took some time before they finally got together $311 to pay for the migration work. The original estimate was to complete by the end of January, but he fell ill and numerous technical issues and a very complex process meant the migration was not ready until Easter. Even then, the member database was not properly converted resulting in members that had changed their email addresses over the years, had an account for each email address. Over 700 members have to be manually corrected and I am still working on that job. Additionally, the automatically assigned passwords that I was due to send out to each member, got corrupted during the installation process and did not work. The only alternative was for members to use the lost password feature to login. All these problems are being worked on so that the next migrations do not have these problems. 

After discussions with several owners of other YahooGroups, there was interest shown in migrating their groups, too. As groups.io had stopped all migrations after successfully migrating just over 3000 groups, I realized that there must be a lot of groups that had also lost their archives from the estimated 10 million YahooGroups that existed. I was persuaded to look into making this into a service. If we can migrate one group, we can migrate more and that led to the start of the  https://forums.group platform that I have been working hard to prepare. The Minutus group was to be the prototype used to prove it can be done and to design the service around. It was a much larger job than I imagined and setting it all up has been costing me several times what the Minutus group scraped together. There was no money to pay me for my time so I have been working long hours without pay to make this all happen. I neglected other projects that would have paid me much more, just so that I could keep my promise to restore the Minutus group. At Easter, I was finally able to present the results of all that work – The Minutus Forum with their completely restored archives in a phpBB forum system.
https://minutus.forums.group/ 

Now many members of the Rife community will remember when I started the Rife Forum back in 2002. A forum system is a very different animal to a mailing list like YahooGroups as it offers a wide range of categories and very much better access to the archives. While groups.io certainly provides better access to the archives than YahooGroups did, in the end, a mailing list is just one very long list of unsorted topics and I compare it to a newspaper – always about the topic of the day, hardly ever about topics discussed years ago because nobody reads the archives. I compare a forum system with a library nicely sorted into categories with each topic like a book in that library. As the topics are so nicely sorted into categories and cross-referenced, the Rife Forum has become a fantastic reference of the Rife world with sections for each interest group. All major devices have their own section, high-level discussions in the technical area, a vast resource of knowledge built up over the years has led to the Rife Forum being much more active than this Rife group, for example.
https://www.rifeforum.com 

The one major difference between a forum and a mailing list is that you cannot post to a forum via email. A forum is designed around being used online where its vast resources can be fully utilized. As a mailing list is just one long unsorted list, that can be posted to via email, as there are no categories to consider. I remember this being an issue when the Rife forum was started and that led to me starting a special YahooGroup specifically to distribute new posts on the Rife Forum via email to the members of the Rifeforum YahooGroup that is of course now also on groups.io at https://groups.io/g/rifeforum

It is a one-way street, new posts are sent out via email, but it is not possible to reply via email. There is no infrastructure in a forum to be able to accept emails and post them into the correct section. There are instead links in each outgoing email that takes you straight to the topic on the forum. This is a compromise that works very well and has allowed the Rife Forum to thrive even more, yet there are only about 3000 members that receive those messages (when you consider how many have bouncing emails or set to no email. The Rife Forum has currently 13,264 members in comparison, of which 1,593 are active posting members. 

When I announced the new Minutus Forum, I explained that they could post on the forum itself or with the TapaTalk app (which works with the Rife Forum, too). After 20 years of open source development of the phpBB forums system, obviously nobody saw it as important enough to create the infrastructure to be able to post via email. It would be very complex and difficult to implement as each message has to be assigned to the correct forum. As it is just as easy to post online instead of via email, why bother. 

I am now starting an InDieGoGo campaign to announce the Forums.Group project and to provide better funding for its expansion, including that Email to forum posting system. Unfortunately, one member absolutely refuses to visit a website to post messages and does not have a smartphone to use the app, either. I have added a function so that new messages are sent out via email, just like what is done with the Rifeforum group reposting Rife Forum (www.rifeforum.com) messages. But even that was not enough. She demanded a system where she could continue to post via email and has since then been on a crusade to attack me, insult me and defame me because she cannot post via email to the forum. Based on the discussions so far, she has the following reasons for hating me:
  1. I did not fully migrate their group to groups.io with archives - I tried, but they did not co-operate in time = Not my fault.
  2. I did not directly add all the members of the YahooGroup to the Minutus Subgroup - That was my plan, but subgroups only allow to Invite members, not directly add them = Not technically possible.
  3. I presented a forum system that was not a mailing list. Having to go to a website to post instead of using email was "horrible" and probably my worst sin of all - the phpBB forum system is a forum, not a mailing list. It is built around people interacting on the forum = Not my fault as using a phpBB forum was the only option left and no such posting via email function existed.
  4. As she is so against using a forum of any kind, she talks about finding out about other groups that were able to take their archives with them. What she is talking about is groups like this my Rife group on groups.io that migrated in time. No longer possible for Minutus as they missed that boat through no fault of mine. 
  5. I am somehow to blame for splitting the group, but it has been her outrage and constant bickering that has brought the Minutus group to a standstill. I just checked again and she has never once logged into the Minutus Forum, but complains how bad it is to use – how can she even know? 
It got so bad that she started attacking me personally. Now members of the Rife group probably know that I always encourage free speech and open debate with no censorship, but I have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying tactics and personal attacks. I gave her a warning and referred the issue to her moderator – Soroush – for handling. I am still waiting for that to be resolved, but she was put on moderation where she made more personal attacks on me that were not released. 

I did not moderate her on the Rife group as she had not attacked me personally there, until now. I have now put her on moderation and she is on her second warning. I allow three warnings and then the next step is permanently banning. Bullies restrict free speech and attack anyone that does not follow their way of thinking. I do not permit such behaviour on any group I run as arguments should be made with better facts and data, not personal attacks. I looked at her previous posts on the Minutus group and she has a history of calling people “racist” etc. when they do not agree with her. 

I know such tactics are all the rage on Twitter where plenty of good people have been destroyed by the so-called “outrage-mob” while they can continue with impunity. Sorry, but here we prefer the honest and respectful posters and it is the “outrage-mob” that get banned here, after three warnings. 

I hope this explanation fully explains the current situation. Posts on the Minutus Forum and group have ground to a halt after all the unpleasantness there recently. Especially her constant badmouthing of the forum and talk of starting yet another group. I have been trying hard to provide informational posts on how to login to the forum and use it.   

She thought it was a good idea to now start attacking me on my own Rife group – bad idea, my group knows me well by now. 

Regards 

Peter Walker

P.S. to the Minutus Forum - it is always bad when such conflict occurs that was totally uncalled for. The point of the new forum is to create a safe place where ALL opinions are welcomed and discussions are held with respect and live and let live. This is possible because you can have separate forum categories for each point-of-view. This allows parallel discussions without getting in the way of the other opinion. 
Instead of only one way or the other is right, now both opinions can have their own place and each side can present their best opinions and data.

Your discussions are safe on the forums.group platform as we fully respect freedom of speech and differences of opinion. 

So, even if you have not posted on the group for years, left in disgust due to differences of opinion, etc. please come back and give the new forum a try. Have respect for other opinions and discuss each topic on its merits, not on who shouts the loudest or is the most aggressive! This is a platform where facts and respect, matter.
 
 
 
 


tbears999
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Re: Brief History of the Minutus YahooGroup

Post by tbears999 »

I have been a long time lurker of this group, and have appreciated reading the responses of people who know more about homeopathy than I can ever hope to learn.  I read most of the posts by Peter when we were nearing the end of the Yahoo Groups platform.  As a software engineer, I know the work that is involved in migrating data.  It can be a nightmare.  I kept thinking that we were going to lose this group and all of its archives because nothing was being decided. At one point,we could pay a small amount for something (maybe to get a copy of the archived posts?) which I did. I want to thank Peter for all the work he has done on this.  It is extraordinary. 

Yes, things have changed. One thing I found in the type of software that I write is that when we changed some functionality, of heaven forbid, updated to a whole new system, there would be repercussions from the users who did not like anything to change,especially if we took away something that they had before.  After a while and lots of complaining they got used to it.  We will get used to this.

Thank you Peter for all your hard work and now I know of other groups because of your involvement in this group.

Susan


tely49
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Re: Brief History of the Minutus YahooGroup

Post by tely49 »

Thank you for your service, Peter!  You were generous to set all this up as it is, and then the extra effort you've had to go through to manage one member's public, unremitting tantrums ... you've given a lot to bridge this scattered group across two platforms, and I just want to acknowledge you.

Tely


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