How to join a Yahoo! group if I don’t have a cell number, Google, Facebook or Twitter account

yahoo-groups

I have no cell number, no Google account and no Facebook account. Why can't I create a Yahoo! account so I can join a group?

Best Answer

Yahoo won't let you register a Yahoo ID without a mobile number. From their help page on the subject:

One of the ways Yahoo helps to protect accounts is by requiring a mobile number to sign up. If you don't provide a valid mobile number, you'll be unable to complete registration.

They also give three reasons why:

Greatly reduces the risk of an abuser accessing your account.

If you need to recover your password, this is the safest and most effective method to recover it.

Yahoo will alert you through your mobile device when we suspect unusual login activity on your Yahoo account.

Related Solutions

Batch download photos from Yahoo Groups

I haven't tried it myself but this SourceForge Project GrabYahooGroup looks promising.

It is a command line utility that claims to download:

all the messages from a group in the order in which they were received
all the attachments associated with the messages
all the content from the Files section in a group maintaining the heirarchy as present on the website
all the content from the Photos section in a group maintaining the heirarchy as present on the website
the members, moderators, pending and bouncing members list

Yahoo Groups – How to Download Entire Archive of Past Messages

There's an option in Yahoo Groups to download Groups Data. I submitted a request but I haven't heard back yet so I can't verify if it's the solution to our problem: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/getmydata

In the meantime, I like this script: https://github.com/IgnoredAmbience/yahoo-group-archiver (Thanks @tripleee in the comments).

This script downloads all files, photos, and more.

You'll need two Cookie values. I describe how to find them in Chrome below.

To use this new script I had to:

Clone the repo locally
cd into the repo
Install its two dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt (best practice is to use a virtualenv)
Find the cookie values (described below)
Using the cookie values and group name, construct the CLI input: ./yahoo.py -ct "<T_cookie>" -cy "<Y_cookie>" "<groupid>".

The <groupid> is found in the URL: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/GROUPID.

My final input looked like this:

./yahoo.py -ct "z=R.mrdBRSOwdBEZbt..VFnXFMzUxMwY2Tzc2MzM3MzZPM040Mz&a=QAE&sk=DAA1.RYcKZA1nr&ks=EAAdKqReOqwn_mFtpt577DhvA--~G&kt=EAADFxdOWYNIRQFzbAFOREkyTkFFeE9EQXhORFF3TkRFNE5Ea3pORGMwTnctLQFE3MTI5MTMmcHM9akYxdEN4b1U2WG9NazR0dUlHQnNBUS0t" -cy "v=1&n=0upf9jdnj00000000&r=intl=us" "My_Awesome_Group"

Finding the cookie values wasn't apparent at first. Using Chrome, this is how I got the values:

Open Chrome settings
Scroll to the bottom and expand "Advanced"
Open "Site Settings"
"Cookies and site data"
"See all cookies and site data"
Search "Yahoo" in the top right
Expand the "yahoo.com" option:
Go into T and Y one at a time and copy their "Content" values to use in the CLI input above.

In case you're interested, one of the Yahoo Groups that I follow is considering paying Groups.io to transfer their Yahoo Group into their site. They were quoted at $220.
https://groups.io/static/transfer