PackRat wrote: > (2) The forum archives search page has got to be the poorest I've > encountered among the various professional email discussion lists I > belong to. The absolutely worst aspect is that it will display 100 and > ONLY 100 matches maximum. There's NO "Next" or "Prev" buttons (or > hotlinks)! There's no easy and practical way to view, say, all of > Roger Hui's posts, if I wanted to learn from "the master". The same > applies to any popular topic with many matches over the years. And you > can probably think of hundreds or thousands of similar situations. > Even though the forum archive is possibly the greatest "gold mine" of > information available to J users, its treasures are virtually > inaccessible to a searcher without a tremendous amount of repetitive > effort in specifying very tiny date ranges to work around the > restriction relating to quantity of results. Every other email archive > I work with is a breeze to find information in; the J archive is at the > opposite end of the spectrum.
Mailman does not include its own search engine and after spending a few days checking through what was available, we felt it was easiest to write our own email search program. I would argue that it works well enough for most purposes. However, now that the forums are mirrored at Gmane and Nabble, you may use their search engines. There are a couple of possibilities for our own site: The search engine is a simple J script, with source at http://www.jsoftware.com/svn/web/trunk/forum/search. For example, it would be a trivial matter to change the "last 100" into a value selectable in the search page. Similarly, to add a help page which documents the options in the find verb in http://www.jsoftware.com/svn/web/trunk/forum/search/find.ijs . Contributions would be welcome. Alternatively, if anyone wishes to contribute a better search engine for us to use on our website, I would be happy to install it. Incidentally, you can get more than 100 hits by setting the date options, but a "next 100" button would be much better. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
