Daniel Zahn wrote:
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:05 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
that, I just don't happen to agree that such behavior (making a mess and then simply walking away) is acceptable in this case.
- I already apologized for breaking links and yes, it was a mistake to
not just replace ALL messages in that thread with XXXs
- It's not like i just wanted to mess with archives for fun, there
have been serious requests by others do remove stuff.
- I warned about broken links myself before, there is a trail for this on RT
- I did not "simply walk away" unless you are expecting me to work in
the middle of the night. I just got to read all your replies and the suggestion to reinsert messages and i am looking at it right now.
Hi.
I've always found you to be incredibly helpful on IRC, on the mailing lists, and elsewhere and I've always appreciated having you around. I apologize if my initial message suggested otherwise.
I read your reply to Guillom's post as "shit happens." And it most certainly does. But you said that the archives were last rebuilt two weeks ago, which is where the timeline kind of fell apart in my head. There was no communication to the list and its members and the archive being rebuilt two weeks ago and the consequences of doing so. It took several people noticing and then someone sending a message to the list to get an acknowledgement that the archive rebuild had even taken place. I found this very off-putting.
Mailing lists are _hugely important_ to the Wikimedia community. I hate Mailman as much as anyone, but for historical, technical, and privacy reasons, mailing lists continue to be _hugely important_. With wikitech-l in particular, Gerrit, CodeReview, Bugzilla, wikitech.wikimedia.org, and hundreds of wikis all rely on a somewhat sane and stable system for linking to particular messages in the wikitech-l archive. I personally consult the wikitech-l archives regularly as do many others.
The link breakage sucks, but it's not my primary concern at this point. My primary concern is that the archive now appears to be corrupt. Messages have apparently gone missing from years ago (e.g., the Tim Starling Day announcement from October 31, 2003) and there are artifacts of messages now erroneously appearing in the August 2012 archive (31 messages with the subject line "No subject"). Is it possible for someone to take a look at this corruption and assess what can be done to fix it?
MZMcBride