David Gerard wrote:
On 17 August 2012 02:23, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Daniel Zahn wrote:
In this case the request was for a complete thread to be removed. Since many people reply with full quotes it usually repeats the information in almost every message. ("TOFU"-posting). But you are right, even in these cases we should, and will, just replace content of every message with a "deleted" message.
What is your plan to clean up the mess you made?
Rewrite the sucky archiver in Mailman?
I always figured it was a "feature" of Mailman that it's so difficult to modify the archives. They're really not supposed to be tampered with.
One thing I would like to see is Google indexing of the WMF archive enabled again. All the third-party archives not under our control are in the search engines, there's not actually any sane reason not to have the official archive indexed - unless it's just to reduce the noise of complaints from people who erroneously think it's possible to remove their own words from the Internet. (We used to substitute it with ht://dig, which was so incredibly awful that nothing at all was a reasonable alternative.)
Yes, this probably makes sense. Bugzilla went the same route (excluded from search engines, everyone relied on mirrors of the wikibugs-l mailing list, finally allowed back in to search engine indices).
The situation is even more bleak for private lists. With those lists, there's no way to search the lists at all, as they're excluded from external search engines indices and the internal search has been disabled for years. The relevant bug is https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/17390.
As MaxSem commented, perhaps Mailman ought to be re-evaluated as the mailing list software, though I've yet to come across (m)any software packages that are better, unfortunately.
MZMcBride