On Wed, 30 May 2001 13:42:51 -0700
Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 30, 2001, at 12:23 PM, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> There is a general perception of the list archives as being the
>> field's library and historical archive.
>>
>> In the end I look at it as questions of public record.
>>
> I agree with that, but I don't agree that this implies a need for
> it to be in the global search engines.
True. Most of my reasoning comes down to members asking for it to
be. The fact that it then acts as free advertising also helps.
> but it's an interesting question to explore. Because if you're in
> the global engines, it's not only a public record, it's potential
> marketing and advertising.
Yup. At this point the vast majority of my archive traffic comes
from users of public search engines.
> But to do that, you have to do something about those email
> addresses to protect them. But if you do, you make it tough for
> someone who sees a message in the archive to write for (or with!)
> more info that the author might find useful.
(I know you/Chuq know this, but the rest of the list might not) My
web archives support writing replies to archived messages via a web
form submission, which are then sent to the list. Its not a
massively used feature (half a dozen posts per month, max), but I
have a few people who only post that way (and read the list off the
web rather than via mail) and a number of people say they value it
very highly despite its their infrequent use of the feature.
Stated reasons:
-- Ability to read/reply to mail I may have missed due to
<insert_problem>
-- Ability to research the archives on a topic and to directly
query continue researching/discussing something found there.
-- Ability to reply to old threads and bring them back into
currency as topical to current interests.
I'm looking to add a feature to allow individual posts to be emailed
to a provided address. There are some obvious controls I'll have to
put in so you can't mail bomb a hapless individual via the archives,
but its a fairly simple problem.
What I ___*REALLY*___ want is to hook up MHonArc to an SQL backend
for archive message storage with all the thread links stored in
under SQL. I've got users clamouring for things like being able to
limit searches to specific threads, for building abstract and
user-dfined views of the archived message base, etc that this would
make very nifty.
> What's do folks think about this? What kind of address munging is
> adequate?
I normally do something ala:
s/@/#/
s/.([A-Za-z]*)$/,\1/
I've toyed with rondomly varying the above pattern across a variety
of replacement characters/strings, but haven't yet.
s/@/_AT_/
s/.([A-Za-z]*)$/_DOT_\1/
My intent has been to leave them human readable, but annoying to
machine parse.
> That might, thinking about it, also deal with the problem of
> people setting up outside, unapproved archives without permission
I've politely asked a couple people not to do this (for other
reasons which I now regret), and they've willingly complied. I'm
aware of several companies which run internal archives of my lists
for their internal staff. I haven't said anything about that, and
don't think I should or properly could.
> if they're grabbing them from the master archive.
ATM that's impossible for me as I don't provide the archive messages
in any raw format. (I used to) When I stopped providing quarterly
mboxes only two users complained. Checking the Apache logs, only
one of them appeared to have ever made use of the mbox availability.
Not much of a loss.
> It wouldn't solve folks who generate archives directly from the
> mail list deliveries, though. Unless you wanted ot munch all
> e-mail addresses in all cases, and we don't want to go there.
Quite. That's rather too invasive.
--
J C Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------(*) http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows
