Thanks Matt and Jeff for your answers--they were very helpful. So, as I
understand it:
- Sending link to mailman raw archives will take care of all posts from
2006 to present (for which the mailman archives exist).
- Listserv digest format to individual email mbox format conversion (for
the older 1994-2006 articles) I'll have to do on my own. :-( Well, I'm
surprised it hasn't come up before but I guess I'll make the script
available for others after I do it (more likely in awk and ksh than perl
since that's what I know better, though I don't have a Unix system these
days so who knows ...?).
- Sending archives in segments and out of chronological order is not a
problem and threading and user interface will not be confused by this
but simply and automatically (or manually by support each time they add
import old archives?) recalculated. E.g., if I send the mailman mbox
first (since it's easy) and the earlier digests later (since I have to
work on it).
- You're willing to make an exception (or try ...) to have all posts
indexed for my list, especially given that it's static, rather than just
the last 3000 (but question on this below).
- I can mirror the archive on my own site if I want (again, question on
this below).
Please let me know if any of the above is not correct.
Two further questions:
1. Does mirroring to my own site involve installing cgi-bin or .php
scripts and so on? In which case are there instructions for that? Or
just a wget-like static copy? It seems like the search and email
obfuscation features at least would require scripts, no?
2. I noticed though that the user interface requires clicking one page
at a time to go back +/- 100 messages or so at a time and there's no
other navigation method. This seems unwieldy--I can see people getting
tired of clicking more than 30 times to go back 3000 messages. Is it not
possible to have a year/month hyperlinked index instead like
2015 - Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May (final)
2014 - Jan | Feb | ... | Dec
...
1995 ...
1994 - Apr (inception) | May | Jun | ... | Dec
on the side or top or bottom for direct access to the time frame of
interest (plus of course Prev Page | Next Page to "scroll" within the
month range in question? Of course I can do that with manually setting
hyperlinks on my own backup version of the archive, especially given
that it's static, but it would be great to have the mail-archive version
do it directly.
3. Is threading based on subject-line matching only (and if so, what if
the same subject happened to appear say 3 years later in a completely
unrelated thread)? Or is it based on In-Reply-To: <Message-ID> type
parsing and linking? (The Digests have these "extraneous" headers
stripped out, leaving only To/From/Date/Subject, so I need to know if
splitting the Digests into their individual posts will break threading.)
4. Is thread view, is there a way to have the date of the past appear
next to each item (e.g., after the author name)? E.g.,
Re: Search returning 404 Jeff Breidenbach 2013-05-31
since the date provides a useful additional context in the threads view.
Regards,
Shahrukh
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