Screenshot of the social calendar website Upcoming.org, which was once popular but couldn't escape its fate of being shut down after Yahoo's acquisition.Yahoo announced last Friday that it would be closing six services, including the social calendar website Upcoming.org. Subsequently, Upcoming founder Andy Baio published a blog post stating that under Yahoo's new policies, Upcoming would sooner or later be closed; he also revealed that he had made multiple buyback requests to Yahoo, all of which were rejected. He further pointed out that since his departure from Yahoo in 2007, Upcoming had severely deteriorated, becoming a hub for spam information.The following is the full text of the article:Yahoo has finally decided to close Upcoming.org. This social calendar service has been with me for over a decade, but Yahoo still followed its usual practice of not sending any site notifications and not providing backup options, hastily announcing that the service would be closed in just 11 days.I knew that under Yahoo’s new strategy, the closure of Upcoming was inevitable, but when the day came, I was still deeply saddened. Months ago, a draft of this article already existed in my computer folder, just waiting for Yahoo's official announcement of Upcoming's demise. Today, I have finally published this article.The Decline of UpcomingThe past five years have been tough for Upcoming. Since Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, and I left Upcoming in 2007, the site began to fall apart. Since then, with a series of redesigns, the social features that made Upcoming famous gradually diminished until they were completely removed. Fortunately, these destructive redesigns did not forget to add the Beta (test) label.By 2009, Upcoming had become a place for people to initiate promotional campaigns and send spam (while self-marketing using this service was not allowed during the first two years of Upcoming's establishment).Unfortunately, there was no other service that could replace the declining Upcoming. Potential competitors Plancast and Going had already shut down; other websites failed to become self-growing communities; while some services only partially covered Upcoming's functions, such as Facebook's private events, Songkick's concerts, and Lanyrd's fantastic aggregation meeting function.But these services are of no help to me, bringing me back to 2002 when searching for events. I missed many of my favorite geek events; when I traveled to a new city, I had to check the event listings in the local weekly newspaper. It was precisely these inconveniences that inspired me to create Upcoming to solve these problems. And now, with Upcoming about to leave us, I feel like I'm back in those confusing times.Now, as Yahoo quietly closes Upcoming, an opportunity has also been wasted.Yahoo's Once Talented TeamIt's hard to believe that Yahoo has fallen into its current state, but at one point, Yahoo was indeed a pretty cool company, standing out in Silicon Valley with its unique scholarly atmosphere. In 2005, during our negotiations with Yahoo regarding the Upcoming deal, the company had a large number of very talented employees, including Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, renowned software engineer Jeremy Zawodny, and Chad Dickerson, who later became the CEO of Etsy. Additionally, Cameron Marlow, Jeffery Bennett, and MORNamaan, among others, were engaged in pioneering research work at Yahoo.At that time, Yahoo acquired the online photo management and sharing site Flickr, absorbing a large number of technical talents and creative geniuses, including Cal Henderson and Heather Champ. These talents injected a fresh bloodline into Yahoo internally. A few months after we joined Yahoo with Upcoming, the social bookmarking service Delicious was also acquired by Yahoo.During that period, bright minds also began to advance into Yahoo's management. Ethan Diamond, who later founded FutureBandcamp, led the revamp of Yahoo Mail; Ian Rogers, who later became the CEO of Topspin, became the head of Yahoo Music services; Bradley Horowitz, currently Google's Vice President of Products, also held important positions at Yahoo. In short, Yahoo at that time was a great workplace.Yahoo Acquires UpcomingUpcoming was my side project while working at a financial company. After my wife gave birth to our son, I had almost no time to invest in Upcoming, but the site continued to grow rapidly. As the site developed, spammers started targeting it, and users reported several bugs, but I didn’t have time to handle them. At that time, managing Upcoming full-time was one of my biggest dreams. That dream came true when Upcoming was acquired by Yahoo.Yahoo seemed like the ideal home for Upcoming. They promised to provide me with sufficient resources to further expand the Upcoming community. We were very happy to join a promising high-tech company and work with a group of excellent colleagues. Although the acquisition price was small, it seemed fair to me. In short, we joined Yahoo with high hopes.I still don't understand how other teams at Yahoo became so dysfunctional after we joined. There was no indication that they would become so terrible in the next few years. And this was just the beginning of Yahoo's decline, which got worse and worse over the next few years.In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a huge mistake. Selling a company usually means losing control, and I was no exception. Moreover, as we have seen, social community sites often fail after being acquired (YouTube is a rare exception). Successful stories are similar, but failure reasons vary. Upcoming's failure can be attributed to Yahoo's particularly poor stewardship.The reason why my Upcoming gained traction was mainly because it addressed real user needs, and people found it very useful. Through Upcoming, many people found friends, met partners, and lonely outsiders found activities they liked. In short, Upcoming could make people's lives easier and better.But now, we are about to lose it.Upcoming Archiving IssuesUnder Yahoo's philosophy, Upcoming has long lost its original meaning and has completely deviated from the purpose I created it for. From this perspective, I should be happy when Yahoo announced that it would be shutting it down.What saddens me is that Yahoo did not provide a backup solution for Upcoming but let it disappear completely. In just 11 days, everything Upcoming has accumulated over the years will vanish from our sight. Good pages endure, and facing each Upcoming page about to disappear, I feel very frustrated.In the past few months, I visited Yahoo multiple times, attempting to repurchase the domain name Upcoming.org and the event database, but they rejected my proposal.To commemorate the upcoming farewell of Upcoming, I attempted to create a permanent archive site, showcasing some data and history of this site with a clean layout and visual interface style. However, I encountered unimaginable difficulties in obtaining metadata.All events and venues on the Upcoming website used automatically incremented IDs, which meant that grabbing content lists would be very simple. But Yahoo's security policy interfered, causing me to only be able to grab partial content every time I tried to back up a page.Moreover, grabbing HTML pages individually cannot obtain the participant list of a popular event, as they are displayed through JavaScript. This means that when you try to get all attributes of an event page, you must grab the event page to get event details and simultaneously access XML files to obtain the participant list.If you have a better way to crawl or can directly provide data for me to dump, please contact me as soon as possible. I guarantee your name will remain confidential.This article was translated from Andy Baio's personal blog waxy.org.