Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2025 May 13

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May 13

GroupMe--Grouply, the site scraper?

The Wikipedia article says that GroupMe started as something called Grouply. Years ago, there was something called Grouply that was famous (infamous) for "scraping" online groups for spamming and mass emailing purposes. Someone would get into a group (Facebook or Yahoo Groups), and collect contact info from the membership. I have some reason to believe that the Grouply that became GroupMe is different from the Grouply that made itself such a nuisance. Can someone find this out definitively? Uporządnicki (talk) 17:13, 13 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You would have to find a source that a Grouply did the mass scraping and stuff first. Also this blog claims the scrapey Grouply was an extension that ceased operations 2018. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:11, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I asked here because I was hoping someone knew better than I do how to find these things. Uporządnicki (talk) 17:36, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FOUND SOMETHING! https://groups.io/g/wslc/topic/grouply_warning_very/38396754. It's somewhere between a Primary Source and User Created Content, so it wouldn't do for a reference in Wikipedia. But I found a discussion board where some individual warns against Grouply. He points out (now I remember) that if someone joined, it would send invitations to join to everyone in his or her contact list, AND to the entire membership of any Yahoo Group he or she was in. The discussion was dated 2008. According to the Wikipedia article on GroupMe, GroupMe was created in May, 2010, and called Grouply, at first. By August of that year, it was called GroupMe.

So this dangerous nuisance called Grouply began no later than 2008. In 2010, someone starts something else and calls it Grouply; presumably, they realized very soon that the name was problematic, so they changed it to GroupMe. Then, in 2018, that other Grouply met its well-deserved (and, one would hope, painful) death. Uporządnicki (talk) 17:51, 19 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]