David Gerard wrote:
On 17 August 2012 22:08, Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com wrote:
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?
A lot of these have been broken for ages, due to the same problem as now. Were these links working prior to this latest breakage?
No, there's also a pile of past corruption in the archives.
I wonder if it makes sense to post the mailing list archives to Meta-Wiki or some other wiki. It seems to have a number of advantages over the use of pipermail:
* built-in search via Lucene; * control over the content (including the ability to suppress posts); * doesn't require rebuilding an archive ever again; and * it would bypass some of Mailman/pipermail's bugs, such as messages being truncated if they happen to contain a line that starts with "From".
I'm sure there are other advantages and disadvantages, but it probably wouldn't be too difficult to set up with a bot or script of some kind. You could put the archives on Meta-Wiki in its own namespace or put it on a separate wiki, even. Maybe you could post the raw message source (headers and all) and then an extension or JavaScript could clean it up for human readability?
Just tossing the idea out there. I'm looking for ways to prevent this from ever being an issue again. Eliminating the use of pipermail seems like the most straightforward way.
MZMcBride