Re: META: Another list archive?

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, David G. Durand wrote:
/David's stuff shortened/

>   I've been approached by the people who run the LINGUIST list, and asked
>if we would allow them to archive CONLANG on the web. We already have a
>public archive at egroups.com (they used to be FINDMAIL).
Some points on eGroups...
I much preferred old Findmail, and got quite a surprise when
I saw it had become 'eGroups', which is much harder to use,
and requires that one registers to get to use things that
were easily accesible from Findmail - I might go as far as
saying that eGroups-archives are worse than -no- archives.

And what's this about not being able to delete any messages
unless you have registered/posted the message through their
system?

>I think web archives have some value,both for finding old
>messages, and as publicity, but I don't feel that Egroups
>is necessarily dependable, since they could go out of
>business at any time.
Web archives are absolutely useful - though as I now am
attempting to use eGroups "for finding old messages", I find
it is quite useless for just that. I won't bother any of you
with the "Tale of The Holy Quest for the Agentive", as
out-pouring more of my extreme frustration over this is
somewhat counter-productive to the discussion at hand.

I have also tested the Linguist-list archives; they seem
more than sufficient for our use, and searching for 'SVO'
doesn't bring up information on the Ford Turbo, which I
-assume- is a car... eGroups brags about hosting 100.000+
groups, but seems inadequate at handling a list producing on
average a measly 1100 messages per month...

(I'll stop dissing eGroups now, promise)

>There is a problem though: the LINUGIST list has less-powerful software
>than egroups.com, and cannot hide email addresses as they do.
What software are they using? After what I've seen of it so
far, changing the data they have to hide e-mail addresses is
as easy as running the entire archive through a perl one-liner...

>I know that some of you have had less-than pleasant dealings with some
>people on LINGUIST, in the form of bitter theoretical debates. But we're
>not talking about some kind of marriage, or merged discussion; rather, it
>seems like a great source of publicity for CONLANG, in a part of the web
>where conlangers (who may not even know the word yet) might well find
>themselves, and then find their way to this list.
I did find the linguist-list prior to finding conlang... I
guess most conlangers fresh on the net would be looking for
"constructed language" or "artificial language" (I sure
did), not knowing the 'correct' term...

>I know that finding (forming) the conlang community has been valuable to
>many of us, and would like to see it grow (though I hope peak traffic
>doesn't get too much higher.
What? You can't handle on average 36 conlang-mails a day? I
guess you're not a sysadmin, then. (I used to dreeeam of
only getting 200 messages per alias per day. ;) )

>I don't know if email anonymizers still exist, but that would be an option
>for those who feel very strongly (though we'd have to arrange those
>subscriptions manually).
Since anon.penet.fi and what it stood for is dead,
anonymizing mail isn't as -easy- as it used to be, though it
is still possible.

For Windows I reccomend looking into the program Private
Idaho at http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/pi.html.

Browse the links at http://www.nymserver.com/resources for
some general info on the subject, and a good introduction to
the whole issue can be found at
http://www.well.com/user/abacard/remail.html


tal.