Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group Archive

[jetsetdanny]

I am thrilled to announce that a complete archive of the messages once posted on the defunct Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group is now available on JSW Central.

The Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group was founded by Dr Andrew Broad on 20 December 1999 (initially as the Yahoo! MM/JSW Club until March 2002). It existed for over 20 years until 15 December 2020, when Yahoo! shut down all Yahoo! Groups.

The Group, which offered a message board, picture galleries and file hosting, quickly became a focal point for the MM/JSW community. Over the years nearly 7,300 messages were posted and by the end of its existence the Group had 742 members. Dr Andrew Broad remained its Owner throughout its entire lifespan.

The early 2000s marked the heyday of the Group’s activity while the number of messages declined sharply after 2010. Following a period of near-inactivity in 2013–2014 the Group experienced a modest revival. However Yahoo! first deleted user-created content from its Groups in December 2019 and then closed the service entirely in 2020.

The Group’s messages form an important part of the history of the development of MM and JSW games for the ZX Spectrum. They contain insights and information that remain useful even today for those interested in creating such games. For this reason the complete archive of the Group’s messages is preserved on JSW Central.

The messages, archived before the Group’s closure, were converted into HTML format for presentation on JSW Central by Michał Gromann. I am very grateful for his assistance in this endeavour 🙏.

The archive contains all 7,186 messages that still existed when the Group went offline (the last message visible online was #7256; in total 70 earlier messages had been deleted either by their authors or by the Owner while the Group was still active). In addition the archive includes 37 messages (#7257-#7293) that were never published online and existed only as emails sent to members after December 2019 but before Yahoo! terminated its Groups altogether in December 2020. Some edits were made to this final batch to protect email addresses and conceal certain restricted content.

This archive does not preserve the original message threads. Nor does it preserve emoticons (with the exception of the last 37 messages), which appear only as missing image placeholders.

You can browse the archive by moving from message to message or by entering a specific message number. Errors will appear if you input a number outside the 0–7293 range, a non-numerical character or the number of a message deleted while the Group was still active.

I will be grateful for feedback if you discover any problems such as messages cut off prematurely. I do know that a lot of links in the older messages are messed up (I believe that's due to the original HTML code) and I will correct these progressively. However, if you discover anything else that needs correcting, please let me know here or by email.

[Spider]

Excellent work and thank you! 🙂 

[jetsetdanny]

I am thrilled to announce that a significant upgrade has been made to the archive of the old Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group messages available on JSW Central.

Apart from ironing out some errors, two important new functionalities have been added:

1) The search function

It is now possible to search through the messages. Several options are available: you can sort the results by "Best match" – an intelligent (although somewhat arbitrary) search – or by "Oldest first" or "Newest first". You can also tick or untick a box called "Include all messages in thread". If ticked, the search results will show not only the message or messages found during the search, but also all other messages in the same thread. You can also choose how many results should be displayed (10, 25, 50 or all).

2) Browsing through the threads

It is now possible to browse the messages by following their threads (use the "Previous in thread" or "Next in thread" arrows instead of "Previous message"/"Next message"). It should be noted that while the thread structure has been restored faithfully from the preserved files (thanks to JSON files saved by John Elliott), there were evident errors in this structure at the time when the original Yahoo! Group existed (some messages that should evidently form a thread don't, and some threads are composed of messages that should evidently be separate). Any errors that were present in the original thread structure will NOT be corrected – the intention of having it on JSW Central is to preserve the rich content of the Yahoo! archive, not to correct it.

All this fantastic work on enhancing the functionality of the archive has been carried out by my son, Michał, who is a young IT professional and who has enriched JSW Central in ways I couldn't even have imagined how to achieve – and I'm extremely grateful to him for his contribution! Michał is planning to publish some technical information about how the search engine works to produce the "Best match" results as well as about the filtering and restoration process of the original messages. When he does, I will post the link here in case anyone might be interested.

So go ahead and browse through the Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group messages archive on JSW Central like never before! 🙂