Early last week, Yahoo Groups chose without warning to delete the torontopoly YahooGroup. In the process, they deleted the list of over 300 subscribers and the archives which have accrued over the years of this long-standing local poly resource.

Lorne Gould was the first to notice the missing list, as he had been hoping to send out a reminder for the month's Ethical Lovers Group, a poly support group which he moderates. He immediately contacted Danaeris, torontopoly.ca's Managing Editor, in order to find out what's up. 

While Danaeris waited to hear back from the list's intrepid moderators BC Holmes and Siobhan NiLoughlin,
Tim Hill, one of the moderators of the local bisexual list BiTO contacted her privately. He writes, "Another YahooGroup disappeared a couple years ago. It was easy to create a new list, with the same name, but the membership and archives were lost." Others have reported similar experiences with sex or kink-related YahooGroups being deleted without warning.

Tim advises moderators of lists that use the Yahoo Groups service to take precautions. "Since then, I've periodically taken a snap shot of the BiTO membership - a couple times a year."

Eventually both BC and Siobhan were able to get an answer from Yahoo -- of sorts. It became clear that Yahoo has some sort of vendetta against BC. Another group she moderated, the Queer Continuum (an email list dedicated to queer speculative fiction), was also deleted, and one of the email addresses on her profile was suspended.

Sadly, Yahoo refused to send either moderator the  archives, or the list of subscribers. Yahoo also proved unwilling to justify their actions, repeatedly sending a form letter which stated that they reserve the right to delete groups.

Today, torontopoly.ca is pleased to announce the launch of our new email announce list, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; a discussion list will follow shortly, and be announced both here and on the announce list. You can subscribe by clicking on the Mailing Lists link on your left.

Community organizers chose to revive the list on this server because it puts the ball back in their court. Another factor was the centralization of resources.

The list is being split into two lists so that those who wish to know about events within the community but are not interested in anything that is high traffic can also be accommodated.