Dunno if wget is the way to go.

Yahoo Groups may do some funkiness to make it difficult to grab whole sites -- I would think they're pretty protective of stuff on their site and will try to resist spiders.

Google Books has a book ("Spidering Hacks") that talks about backing up Yahoo groups. Long linky:

http://books.google.com/books?id=4M2wlXE0oCsC&pg=PR6&lpg=PR6&dq=%22yahoo+groups%22+wget&source=web&ots=xWdRuk2Wvj&sig=uev4aNJROEmu8JRNAiQDNUcp-eY&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result#PPA143,M1

It discusses using a perl module - www::yahoo::groups.

http://search.cpan.org/~spoon/WWW-Yahoo-Groups-1.91/lib/WWW/Yahoo/Groups.pm

It's pretty easy to install perl, at least something like the ActiveState version (but it can be a big download). Perhaps you can find someone who already has it installed. There may be something else out there, too, but this is the first thing that popped up that looked reasonable.

HTH! Good luck!

Cheers,
Scott.

And thanks, Scott for that nifty Perl guts intro.
Fascinating, though while some logic is ~legible on inspection -- there be no grokking to medium-ness even, without a full glossary-in-mind. A Chess Master might well Love Perl (?)

(I recall way-back Ben showing a particularly compressed, arcane script which presumably was optimized for min. machine instruction / ie. speed, via all tricks: illegible, of course, to unwashed.)

I gather that a rote install of Perl 5 gets you a decent robot, with this module installed Then it's up to operator to vary the crawl time spans, # of messages and such -- not to get booted.

Will see if anyone in the group is Unixy, Google some Winders 'solutions' for the more probable: 'Er, nobody here like that.. What's Unix?'

(Would have to camp out at neighbor's for HSpeed, while repeatedly looking up Perl basic definitions, with every keystroke. There was a time when this would be fun -- but not under pressure to Produce. Etc.)

But that's OK; engineer types (some) have friends too. Maybe even knows a Perl Monk or acolyte.

Thanks: as this is aimed precisely at Yahoo, it has to be the most pregnant path.
Hmm CL on neighbor's iMac ... could happen. Instead of Sat. NYTimes crossword.
(Or maybe more like.. flying that 747, with Charlatan Heston stuck in the windshield?)

A.

Welcome to IWETHEY!