WotC Closing LISTSERV Mailing Lists

One of the earliest online discussion mediums used by the RPG fan community, predating forums and messageboards (and, of course, social media), the LISTERV mailing lists maintained by WotC are set to close down. "On February 15, 2015, Wizards of the Coast will terminate our LISTSERV system that manages this (and other) mailing lists. We've watched the usage of these mailing lists dwindle due to the rise of other communication platforms, such as forums and social media. Given this decreased usage, we have made the decision that it was time to turn them off."

WotC maintains lists for a wide range of topics, including individual settings and games. If you want to save anything there, you have a couple of weeks to do so. Thanks to Dragonhelm and others for the scoop!

 

[Asatru009]

For a person that doesn't know about spidering a website or whatever, how can this stuff be preserved? I would love to do that and host it but I have not a clue on what would be needed.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

From AuldDragon over at the Candlekeep.com forums, some good news:

My crawl completed at over one million files, and after some minor modifications, spot checks of the lists (all lists except DCI New Zealand, Japan Champs, and Japan Event Organizers, which were password protected) show they work. The files need a lot of cleanup before they can go live anywhere though.

Jeff