Okay, everyone give me a vote, yes or no, to have out list archived. I'll post the results to the list. Have your vote in NLT 12/12/97.-Bill ---------- > From: Karen Isaacson <karen@rand.org> > To: listowners-announce@rootsweb.com > Subject: STATUS: Archives of RootsWeb messages > Date: Sunday, December 07, 1997 10:08 PM > > As many of you know, I hit a little hitch earlier this week when I went to > index the archived messages from the various mailing lists: I ran out of > disk space. We initially thought we'd delay the roll-out of the > searchable archives until Brian could purchase and install a new, larger, > drive, but given only ten or so of the mailing lists were not indexed, it > seemed a shame to not make the 2000+ ones that were available. > > It's =very= much in beta test right now (like, I only finished the code > ten minutes ago), so hold off on announcing this to your listmembers for, > oh, 24 hours or so, in case something goes boom! and we have to take it > offline for tuning. But if you want to give it a whirl, take a look at > > http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl > > It does assume you know the name of the list you want to search. But it's > not too fussy about how you type it: for the SMITH list, you can ask for > smith, Smith, SMITH, smiTh-L, and SMith-D, and still succeed. It includes > messages through about a week ago. I'll add new messages every week > or two. (It took literally hours to do the indexing, and we'll have > to turn the search off whenever we reindex, so this will only be done > every few weeks unless we find a solution.) > > We haven't turned on the threaded archives for all lists yet (and we won't > for those who have specifically opted out) -- Brian still needs to make > some tweaks to the system to protect against web-crawling > address-sniffers. (This isn't a danger with the non-threaded search engine > I just put up, where the messages are hidden behind the search engine.) > If you want the threaded message base =now=, rather than waiting > for the tweaks to be made, just subscribe to your list the address > > archiver@lists.rootsweb.com > > Besides the lists that definitely don't want to participate (you know who > you are <grin>), the following lists aren't available for searching due to > space constraints: > > GEN-MEDIEVAL > GEN-SLAVIC > GENCMP > GENMSC > GEN-DE > GEN-FF > GEN-FR > > and a handful of non-genealogy lists. I have a workaround in mind, > and those lists may be available as soon as late tomorrow or > Wednesday. > > If your list is available for searching, and you didn't want that, you need > to do two things. First, add "archiver@lists.rootsweb.com" to the reject > list for your mailing list (you can access this from the "edit selected > files" button at the bottom of your utility page). Second, write to > listmaster@rootsweb.com and ask that the message base for your list be > removed. (Please, don't ask for this unless the message base is there. > I've already complied with requests to leave certain lists out, and > believe I've done so in all cases.) > > If you asked me to discard your earlier messages and start fresh, you'll > find that the search page comes up OK for your list, but when you go to > search, you get bat guano. Not to worry -- that's because I discarded > your earlier messages and haven't yet imported the new ones, so there's > nothing to search. > > Finally, this is an interim approach. The proverbial "half a loaf". ;-) > The system we want to have is one where you type something in the search > box, are returned a list of possible hits, you then select one of the > hits, and presto! are in a threaded message base so that, if you want, you > can scoot up and down the thread that contained the message of interest, > post a response to the sender or to the list, as appropriate. The current > system won't do that... I also don't have control (or don't know that I > have control) over the format of the page of matches, nor of the displayed > message. Lots of room for improvement. Stay tuned? > > Karen >