On Group Deletions

There’s a belief that Yahoo! Takes pleasure in deleting large numbers of groups. Personally, I don’t believe that to be the case.

The figure below shows the some of statistics about deleted groups that I've compiled. The chart below shows about two years worth of data.

The aqua colored line shows the number of groups I've checked each month. The yellow line shows the growth of my group database. The number of groups referenced represents all the groups I've checked "adult" and "non-adult." For reference, in this dataset I never recheck "non-adult groups and rarely recheck deleted groups. Other groups have been checked regularly with a period of every 3-4 months. I believe that the size of my catalog represents a relatively constant percentage of the total of the Yahoo! Groups that exist. I would make an educated guess that there are more that there are/have been 14 million groups created over the last 6 years.

The maroon bars show the percentage of deleted groups (relative to the number of groups checked) found each month. A deleted group is a group that I know to have existed and that I had previously listed. The maroon line shows the linear interpolation of that percentage.

The blue bars represents the number of groups that are Deleted on Arrival (DOA). These groups have been deleted announced or referenced somewhere that were deleted before I could add them to the database. The blue line is the linear interpolation of the DOA data.

The percentage of groups deleted each month over the last two years has been increasing. But, if you notice the slope of that increase is very similar to the growth of the database. Since the number of groups I check is a constant, I would conclude that the percent of groups deleted is directly related to the size of that database and likewise relative to the total number of Yahoo! Groups. So the total number of groups deleted each month is constant.

Anecdotes of deleted groups are posted in many of the groups. Notably, in the adult groups but also in the religious groups. Two groups of people that often feel persecuted for their pursuits. Why would Yahoo go to the trouble of picking out these two group? In fact Yahoo doesn't have a particular pattern as to which group categories they delete that I could discern.

Before my last group got deleted I noticed the group giving me an error message something to the effect of "Bad index ID." Then the group disappeared completely.

If you put all this together, I come to the conclusion that groups are not being deleted, they're getting lost!

If Yahoo! wanted to rid itself of adult groups then why not just get rid of them? For example, why pick on 1 or 2 Femdom groups out of 700? Why delete a modest volume spanking group when you could easily delete 6000 groups with zero members?

Yahoo! Groups is a free service. Even with all the ads you see that can't generate a whole lot of income. Efforts by Yahoo! to make the groups a subscription service have been met with howls of protest. As a business, if the revenue is low, would you invest any kind of manpower to pick on certain groups? I wouldn't. Would you spend any significant time fixing a bug that has plagued the groups since for years? I wouldn't.

I read the just the other day (6/2/05) that a woman was suing Yahoo! to remove an unauthorized adult profile that her ex-boyfriend created about her. She filed online and mailed numerous requests to have the profile removed. Yahoo! Never responded. So, she is suing them. You have to sue Yahoo! to get their attention!? And you think they are going to take issue with a group about dragqueens?

Granted if your group is a lost group, you can feel pretty ticked off. Yahoo!’s lack of response is very frustrating. The automated messages sent are infuriating and shed no light over any supposed infraction. I lost I screen name and 2 out of 10 groups that I own or moderate over the last two years. The automated response from Yahoo was that I

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As far as Yahoo! hating particular groups, I don’t believe that to be the case either. Looking at the following table show the deletion rate by category for the top 25 highest categories. The deletion rate is defined by the number of groups deleted in a category divided by the total number of groups in that category.

I read a post that declared that Yahoo! is against gays because they delete those the most. This is not the case. Gay Male groups is 90^th on the list.

Yahoo! Groups certainly has it’s problems. I don’t think they’re being malicious. Then again remember that the Groups are still free.