Re: lynx-dev Agreement, opinions about the move ? (Was Re: mailing-list problem (Was Re: lynx-dev What happened to MINGW patch? (fwd)))

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Frédéric L. W. Meunier wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Thomas Dickey wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Frédéric L. W. Meunier wrote:
> >
> > > Yes, we could just add the 140+ automatically, but we don't
> > > know how many are still "valid".
> >
> > We'll be able to tell once it's moved by looking at bounces.
>
> Not all invalid accounts return "User unknown" or something,
> and others may be valid but not used anymore.

I suppose so.  I'd expect those mailboxes to be overflowing though.

> Maybe it could be done ? Why not, after all it's the same if
> Bob forwarded them to the new list. Better let people know
> about the move immediately and don't have to deal with all the
> spam from the old list. If they really want to contact
> lynx-dev, they'll know how to do once they read the message.

Yes - the first thing to do is to turn off the spam (modify the process
so the archives only get what's sent to the mailing list).  Cleaning up
the archives can be done second.

> It could be done until a new release.

Presumably that would be less than a year.  I'd like to make 2.8.6 focus
on the maintainability aspects (K&R, some support for cross-compiling, and
the doable items from Debian bug reports).  Dropping K&R would make it
simpler to ifdef IZ's table patch (something that occurred to me after I
decided to do this).

> > > 7- Remove the spam from the FLORA.org archives. I already did
> > > it for 2000-January 2004 (thanks to Pine), and really don't
> > > think there was any before it. Well, there was one in December
> > > 1999, but that's probably all. A spam (probably from a
> > > subscriber) in thousands of messages isn't that bad. 90% or
> > > more was.
> >
> > I'm told that the "real" archives aren't in mbox form, but as
> > a database.
>
> Because they wrote "Web-based reader of archive (Importing all
> articles we could find)." ?

That was what Russell McOrmond said.  Among other things:
  To solve the problem you need to solve two independent issues:

  a) Who has the time and trust of the community to do the pruning?
  b) People are linking directly to message URL's -- if you remove a
     message from the mailbox archive and then re-run MHonArc then all the
     message numbers (and URL's) change.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

; To UNSUBSCRIBE: Send "unsubscribe lynx-dev" to address@hidden