Date   : Mon, 29 Feb 2016 22:10:21 +0000
From   : jgh@... (J.G.Harston)
Subject: Loss of BBC / Acorn sites

John wrote:
> Preserving the sites in their original form is an interesting
> proposition - how pure should we be, will future generations look back
> and say 'you shouldn't have interfered, just left the links alone as
> the PHP was an interesting web development...'?

I'm very reluctant to change any of the contents of the BBC Mailing List 
archive on mdfs.net, as that breaks its "its-ness" as an archive of 
actual actuality, but tweeking broken links is the one thing that I 
allow myself to do, purely to stop my server being flooded with 'broken 
link' reports. I try to do it by just programatically not wrapping links 
in <a href> code so they remain as text in the message but not made into 
links in the HTML.

The three other things the processor does that results in the online 
archive not being a pure reflection of the raw data is:
system messages are ignored (eg subscribe/unsubscribe messages)
messages shorter than a certain threashold are ignored (currently 
something like 80 bytes) which means that messages with no body don't 
get output. I noticed it also filtered out those single-sentence spam 
messages a few months ago.
email addresses have the '@' replaced with ' at '.

-- 
J.G.Harston - jgh@...      - mdfs.net/jgh