Yahoo group ‘glrowers’ vanishes

GLRF member @crewhead01 of the Pittsburgh Crewheads, and creator of the first online gay rowers list-serve, reported that Yahoo had deleted his email as well as the Yahoo group, ‘glrowers.’ He indicated that the action came as a complete surprise and he was not give any explanation or advance notice.

Lewis was responsible for establishing the first online list-serve for gay and lesbian rowers in 1996. It was the main resource for many rowers hoping to row in Amsterdam at the Gay Games in 1998.

In 2001, Lewis converted the list-serve to the Yahoo groups format to more simply administer the growing list of rowers. After the launch of GLRF in 2003, the glrowers Yahoo group acted as an adjunct to GLRF, providing an additional discussion area for website visitors to quickly read and post rowing information.

Yahoo gave no explanation for its actions. There is speculation that an individual or an organization had filed a complaint. That usually is all it takes to get a group removed.

GLRF is currently working on some new features that will provide the same functionality of the glrowers Yahoo group, including multiple levels of notification for posts to the various Global Rower country pages.

A huge thank you to Lewis for his many years of support to the gay and lesbian rowing community!