[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Barry Warsaw]

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Steve makes me think of a couple of other wish list items.

On Jul 3, 2007, at 7:36 AM, Steve Huston wrote:

> On 7/2/07 11:06 PM, Terri Oda wrote:
>> - better address obfuscation (maybe by generating pages through cgi)
>
> I run a few Wordpress sites, and there's a plugin I use called
> PHPEnkoder which does a good job of this.

I have this idea that you could gateway messages from an archive or  
mailing list to and from a bulletin board forum.  Maybe this doesn't  
fall within the scope of the archiver because I could see a 'forum  
queue' like we have an nntp queue, but in that case, being able to  
calculate an archive url without talking to the archiver becomes  
important again.  It would be nice in that case to put a link to the  
archive message in the forum post.

>>      * MUAs usually make URLs clickable. An new Archive could be used
>> when posts are distributed, in the footer, so that each message has a
>> link to the whole thread in the Archive.
>
> This would be a Godsend.  A group at work here runs an old homebrewed
> exploder, and a few years ago I tried to convert them to Mailman.   
> They
> liked everything they saw, up until the point where they couldn't  
> refer
> to some kind of short and simple message number, and get right to that
> message in the archive.

This reminds me, I would love to have a link in an archive message  
that I could click to get the message sent to me, as it originally  
appeared on the mailing list.  If I had that, I'd never need to  
locally save another mailing list post.  I'd just search for the one  
I wanted, go to the archive, click on the "send it to me" link, then  
do a normal reply in my mail reader.

> The current system generates a number based on
> a simple incrementing index of the list, and many months after a  
> mailing
> people will refer to "message #483", and know they can view it at
> http://hostname/foo/listname/483.html - which is also posted in the
> footer of the message sent out.  Of course, if the archives were based
> on Message-ID headers, this may make such a number a bit unwieldly,  
> but
> if it were some kind of simple-ish system I might finally get rid of
> those old lists :>

This would be possible with today's system, but it leads to unstable  
urls, especially when you consider archive scrubbing (which, come to  
think of it, is another wish list item ;).  We'd like for an admin to  
be able to easily pull an archive message, but it's even worse than  
that.  Sometimes an admin has to scrub the actual backing message  
store (e.g. today's mbox file).  This will change the message counts  
and thus the incremental indexes.

Maybe a way to think about this is that the canonical url is based on  
the message-id, but then there's some way to distill even this down  
to a tinyurl or simple integer that would be stable in the face of  
full archive regenerations.

- -Barry

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