s r wrote:
quoted 3 lines i believ it is hyperreal setup that archived
> i believ it is hyperreal setup that archived
> messages are kept in chunks of like 1-3 megs in
> txt format
Well, your complaint is that you find browsing and searching these archives to
be inconvenient. From an administrator's point of view, this archive format
(Berkeley mbox) is extremely convenient for permanent storage of messages. In
fact, nothing beats it, on that basis alone. It's also not the only archive
format we have; it's just the only one we publicly expose.
As for migrating to a newsgroup rather than a mailing list, no. Usenet
newsgroups are distributed on a completely different kind of system from a
mailing list. There are pros and cons to both, but they are not equivalent.
And the point remains that there is nothing inherent to newsgroups that makes
them easier to browse and search; it's still a matter of either providing a
fancy HTML interface, or letting you load the raw data into mail/news reading
software that does the same thing.
Setting up a web-based interface that makes the messages look pretty in a
browser and lists them in threaded indexes is a completely separate issue.
Lots of sites that run mailing lists provide web-based interfaces to their
archives. These are usually made by running mbox files through a script that
explodes them into tens of thousands of separate HTML files, tripling the size
of the archive and making maintenance & backup a nightmare for the admins.
I gave up on this approach with the current software that's out there because
it was so wasteful and because generating the archives would tie up the
machine for *days* before the scripts crashed. We had plans to start using the
software offered by
http://eyebrowse.tigris.org/ but they went from stalled
development to overengineering, and now I'm hesitant to try their system.
So rather than not have any archives at all, I chose to at least keep the raw
mbox files available for download. You can import these into some email
programs ... Netscape and Eudora, I'm sure, and maybe Outlook and Outlook
Express. And of course the text-based readers like Pine, Mutt, Elm on *nix
systems can handle them just fine. So there are those might be options for
you, if nothing else.
- Mike (not the list admin, but repsonsible for the archives)
____________________________________________________________________________
mike j. brown, fourthought.com | xml/xslt:
http://skew.org/xml/
denver/boulder, colorado, usa | personal:
http://hyperreal.org/~mike/
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