Going forward from 2019-10-17 as of today, sometime in the immediate future Yahoo will act like a Yahoo and atrophy, let die and finally terminate all support for the User Group Safari Friends. To the end of finding an alternative, I have put together the following solution that will save all the user data. And as it turns out in some instances this will be a major benefit to everyone by increasing exponentially the functional access to the user messages, photos and files.

The presentation is based on using a program that runs on a PC. This program has been offered at a reduced rate to our user group for $10 instead of $24.95. I do not know the details of how to purchase at this price but the author will let us know in the next short time. However the program can be used for free for the next 3 weeks which will give me time to sort out that detail with the author.

A key point to note is that the program will run offline and very fast with better access to all messages since 2000. There are multiple ways to search and refine searches for data. No more difficulties with trying to remember who posted on a topic, the topic or endlessly trying to post pictures and them being lost or not shown. There are extensive ways to find all the information. I will show a starting point in the video below. What should be in the front of our minds is, this information will be available in an emergency and when there is no internet connection.

The program is called PGOffline, and the download site will be listed below. So here is the procedure and it is the usual PC install. As noted this is only for PC’s but there is a way to run this on Apple but you will have to install the Oracle Virtural Machine program and then load the Windows OS into that machine. It is not difficult but does add to the difficulties that PC people will not have. I only cover the PC machines below. But to delineate the steps we will break it down.

1. Download the program from the link http://www.personalgroupware.com/groupmanager/pg-offline-4-0-897.zip and install it on your hard drive.
2. Install the PGOffline program, use the defaults for the install.
3. Watch the video carefully, twice.
4. Download the database file http://08-aug-2014.s3.amazonaws.com/2019-10-17-safarifriends-yahoo/ygroups.db3?AWSAccessKeyId=1YRY3X8P49KQG5A3DG82&Expires=1574055284&Signature=HdRbQr7sDYJtESUDp3Ky3thjdE0%3D I have set this to expire in 30 days. Download the Yahoo database of messages to a specific spot on your disk drive. The file is not that large at 185MB, but if you have only an SSD drive you want to take the space into consideration and maybe use a removable drive for the file.
5. Run the program and go to File/Open the database, navigate to where you just downloaded the database file in 3 above.
6. Continue as per the video.