I am forwarding this message to all of my list. It has a new
address for the archived messages.
and updated information on their progress.
----------
From: Karen Isaacson
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(a)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(a)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(a)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