It seems that Yahoo Groups publishes RSS feeds for all their discussion groups. Well, I didn’t know… its not like they actually publicised it or anything… Archive.org has a page that gives you the feed URL for a given group. Neato.
Or it would be if it wasn’t totally broken at the Yahoo end. Yahoo generate an <item> for each message posted to a group, but the <title> is the poster’s name, not the message’s subject. The subject actually appears in the <description>, together with a link to the message text. So, for, say, the wonderful WinTechOffTopic group, you get this abomination.
Okay, so I understand why they don’t provide the full message text in the feed: they want people to register and view their advertisements. But this is fecking unusable! Who ever wants the messages keyed on author name? With a femtosecond’s thought this could have been so good. Bah.