At 10:29 AM 3/12/2006, Bob Tracy wrote:
All,
Jim brings up some great points and I agree with him wholeheartedly.
Spliting the group (again) is not the answer. I already get more mail from
the reflector every day than I'd really like but I feel an obligation to
monitor it for questions about CAT and third-party problems. My experience
with Yahoo groups hasn't been all that encouraging.
The main problem with the reflector is that it is not searchable and like
Jim said, that can be cured.
And, having spent a fair number of hours over the past couple of weeks
going through the last few years of email, I've realized that the vast
majority of emails that I kept "for future reference" actually had a fairly
short useful life. I often do search all my old emails for information
such as a URL or link to some useful piece of information, or an
attachment. However, I find that this is probably not the optimum way to
keep the information. I'd have been better off cutting and pasting that
chunk into some running file that is searchable.
There ARE good reasons to keep a series of email exchanges around (when you
need a chronological record of events).
So, searchable archives are a good first step. And, providing that the
search capability is sufficiently powerful (you need simple booleans) that
will meet 99% of the need. In reality, having the ability to download the
mass of emails, all in one giant chronological text file, spanning, say, a
year at a crack, would probably serve. I can probably search that file
faster on my machine locally than using some web-based application on a
centralized server (although google is quite effective). This, by the way,
is a problem with Yahoo's searching of yahoo group messages.. it times out
pretty quickly, so searching the "whole" archive is sometimes
problematic. It also returns the results in a pretty "non-dense"
form. I'd like one line per hit, just like my email program gives me, so I
can see dozens of hits at once. {I may be unfairly castigating Yahoo here,
there might be some sort of search option I need to set up.}
I've worked with archiving systems that work in one month chunks, and
unless the search method makes it "easy" to search lots of months together,
it's real tedious. By easy I do NOT mean: select check boxes for each
month every time I search.
As far as keeping that monolithic file of email straight, on my machine,
suppose one could set up a SVN server with the archives and use one of its
tools to keep it up to date on your machine.
This addresses the "list participant searching for something they've seen
before" use.
However, the "monolithic file using grep" is a bad model for the casual
user looking for info using google. If you've ever googled and found the
hit in some archive of rec.whatever, you'll know what I mean. You have to
search through kilobytes of dreck to find what you want.
So, for that application, there's no substitute for someone editing a FAQ.
With respect to web-based forums.. They don't always play nice with search
engines and all browsers. I do a fair amount of work (particularly looking
up things) with my Treo 650, and while email works just fine, trying to use
a web-based application that doesn't contemplate something with a half
width screen is painful. Search engines also tend to wind up indexing
somewhere into the middle of the forum with URLs that are tied to the forum
implementation and which have the annoying habit of going away or winding
up pointing somewhere else.
Jim
