Archive Team is trying to save as much of it as possible, and you can help!

By setting up the Archive Team Warrior and letting it run in the background, you can back up questions and answers from Yahoo! Answers and make them available in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The Archive Team Warrior is easy to set up and uses very few of your system resources. The Archive Team Warrior can work on up to 6 items concurrently.

Advanced users can also run the project with Docker using the atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/yahooanswers-grab Docker image, which can easily be deployed on large networks and allows for running projects at a higher concurrency rate per container (maximum 20 concurrent items, though users running the project with this many concurrent items might be rate-limited by Yahoo!).

If you need any help or have any questions about the project, please feel free to refer to the project page on the Archive Team Wiki or ask in Archive Team’s IRC channel for the Yahoo! Answers project. (Please be patient and stay connected if your question isn’t immediately answered so you don’t miss any responses.)

Fortunately, by 2017 it became clear that such a shutdown would not be happening and the internet breathed a sigh of relief…

Come April 2021 when Yahoo! announces that Answers actually will be shutting down within a month. The hastily published FAQ page tells users that the site will go read-only by 20 April, but does not give any reasons for the shutdown. The closest thing to an explanation for the is an excerpt in an e-mail sent to registered members, as reported by The Verge:

While Yahoo Answers was once a key part of Yahoo’s products and services, it has become less popular over the years as the needs of our members have changed. To that end, we have decided to shift our resources away from Yahoo Answers to focus on products that better serve our members and deliver on Yahoo’s promise of providing premium trusted content.

Had things gone differently, we might have been facing a much more grim situation, trying to cram 16 years of web history into a few weeks. Conveniently, archivists are not empty-handed, with the 2016 grab already under Archive Team’s belt. Not to mention that the scripts used for the previous grab were also ready to use after some retooling.

To grab the 5 years worth of content in between, Archive Team has already set up a project into motion. Archive Team have already grabbed a few hundred gigs worth of data and you can follow the project status on #noanswers on HackInt.

Yahoo! Answers was a forum where many questions found their answers throughout the Web 2.0 era. And now, one final question Yahoo! Answers, is what merit there is to proactive archiving. Even a 15 year-old website may only have as short as a month between announcement and shutdown. “Today it is here, tomorrow it will stay”, is no longer a healthy assumption in this volatile age of the web. We need backups before the warning siren.

So let us smile at this happy ending as Yahoo! Answers will trustfully be preserved. Now if you excuse me, it’s time for me to brush up on Ouija Boards.