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Re: list move and archive messages



A few comments below.

>I'm not advocating Yahoo, Topica, or any other method, for the Sinclair
>Discussions, however I wanted to point out that my experience with
>Topica.com has been excellent and it is a quality service for purposes such
>as discussion lists.  

As near as I can tell, either Yahoo! or Topica would work just fine,
as would any number of other commercial services or private hosting
facilities.

The real issues involved in maintaining this list have much more to do
with being willing to handle the politics than with technology.

>2)  Regarding the archived messages from the group, I've never visited John
>Q's archives and don't know the search capabilities, etc.

A few months ago I installed a webglimpse search capability.
Webglimpse is a commercial product that has a nonprofit
for free distribution, which is what I'm using for this list.
Any number of other people could do the same thing.

>  Although messages
>are archived on the Topica lists that I referred to earlier, I don't think
>that they can be "moved" if that were needed at some point.  I think that
>they might just be lost.  I'm not sure about Yahoo.  Gary, can archived
>messages be "moved" to another server or service from Yahoo if you wanted to
>move the list at some point in the future?  John Q's list has had a wealth
>of information "e-mailed" during the past 5 years.  We don't want to lose
>these gems, nor do we want to possibly lose the bounty that is yet to come.
>Let's consider a method that can handle this information and can be "moved"
>if needed in the future (as others may elect to pass the torch!).  Perhaps
>Steve's method could provide that for the Discussion list.  Again, I'm not
>sure about moving old e-mail messages, etc. from Yahoo to another list.

[ Excess quotations omitted. ]


Simply archive the messages elsewhere as well as on Topica or Yahoo!.
This is trivial to do on any Unix system; subscribe to the list, wherever
it is, and use procmail or a sendmail or postfix alias to redirect a
copy to an archive.  That's all I do to save the existing archive.
Then I use mhonarc to turn it into web pages nightly, and also
run webglimpse over it to set up a searchable index.
Steve's people, for example, could probably do this, either
with the software I named, or with some other software.

For that matter, there's no reason there has to be only one searchable
archive.  There could be more than one, with different search techniques,
hosted in different places.  That way even if one is lost, nothing is
really lost.

The current list archives are being indexed by google, fastsearch, inktomi,
and several other search engines, not to mention most likely preserved
forever by archive.org.  Once something is out there on the web, it's
relatively meaningless to talk about retracting it.

Nonetheless, to keep it accessible, searchable archives are good,
and it is possible to have more than one of those.

>...

>Mel of South Carolina

John S. Quarterman <jsq@quarterman.org>
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