News

COSMAC ELF Group Moving to Groups.io

This isn’t the first time the COSMAC ELF group has moved, but it’s been a while.

On April 2, 2001, the COSMAC ELF forum debuted at a website named myforum.net (now long defunct, but the old cosmacelf.myforum.net can still be viewed thanks to archive.org).  The main goal, at the time, was simple: to provide support for a Palm OS based ELF emulator. There wasn’t much traffic, but even so the website was clunky, so in December of 2001 the forum moved to Yahoo Groups.

Yahoo hosted the group for over 17 years, and has served the community well. In recent years, however, Yahoo Groups has stagnated. No features have been added in several years, attachments get handled inconsistently, and most recently Photo uploads broke altogether. Most ominously, however, Yahoo no longer provides a support path for reporting these issues and getting them addressed.

Enter groups.io.

Like Yahoo groups, groups.io supports interaction both through email and via their website. The similarity to Yahoo’s base functionality isn’t surpising: the founder of groups.io is Mark Fletcher, who in 1998 started the business that Yahoo bought in 2000 to create Yahoo groups (more on this history here).

The new group should give you everything Yahoo had, including the Files and Photos sections. The editor on the website supports simple text formatting options like bold and italic text, bullet points, hyperlinks, and inline images. The group will also have a Wiki, allowing you to add persistent, organized content pages about your own projects or collections.

Another nice feature is that any member can download an archive of the group’s content with the click of a button, addressing concerns about loss of content should something unexpected happen, like groups.io going out of business.

Will groups.io be perfect and please everyone? I doubt it. Will there be issues? Probably. Once you get past “SEQ IDL,” life gets complicated. There is reason to believe that groups.io will be an improvement over Yahoo, though.

The old group content will be copied to groups.io soon. When this happens, members with valid email addresses in the Yahoo group will receive a notification of the transfer. After the transfer is completed, the Yahoo group will effectively become read-only, with announcement text redirecting visitors to the new forum.

Hopefully this will be a good move for our community.

The boxes are packed and the truck is idling outside.

See you at our new home, https://groups.io/g/cosmacelf .

© Dave Ruske 2001-2022, except where noted