Date   : Mon, 21 Feb 2005 15:56:36 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: What mailing list archive features do you want?

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 15:02 +0000, Jon Ripley wrote:
> Hi everyone,

arft'noon...

> Update frequency.

Isn't the archive essentially just another member of the mailing list
though (just one that never posts anything!) and so there's no issue of
update frequency - it just happens automagically? Or is there a good
reason to not do this? 

> The search feature.

Issues with using Google here:

  I have a feeling there's no way of doing a case-sensitive search
(useful when an acronym you want to search for happens to be a
legitimate word too, which in the IT world happens all too often)

  How do I sort by date (ascending or descending) or filter by date
range? (amazing how often I'll know roughly what month something was
posted but not necessarily enough of the content to make it appear near
the top of a search by keyword)

> Other stuff.

1) is there any way of getting real email addresses out of the archive
(possibly by emailing yourself and asking on a per-message basis? :)

From a preservation point of view, I've found it invaluable (in
restoring rarer machines of any type) to be able to contact people on
occasion who posted relevant things to lists, sometimes many years ago.

2) Is there a way of displaying a threaded view of messages in search
results? (i.e. as a usenet client would do it, rather than the "click
your way through each message" that the web UI's currently set up for)

> One thing that I have been pondering for a while now is integrating the 
> BBC-Micro and Beeb Emulators mailing lists into one archive rather than 
> keeping them as two separate archives as they are now. As you may be 
> aware the Beeb Emulators mailing list was integrated into BBC-Micro 
> several years ago. Thoughts please.

Personal opinion - if the lists are seperate, the archives should be
seperate. That doesn't mean to say that the front-end (i.e. the web
pages) don't need the ability to search both *under user control* (i.e.
default to one or the other or something but allow the user to select
both if they want)

cheers!

Jules