Next message: Frank Reed: "Re: An experimental Navigation list"
Alex E, you wrote:
"Sorry, I did not follow this discussion from the beginning,
but I see that there is a motion to move the list to another
server (or to start another list).
My main concern is:
"What will happen to the archive of this current list???"
I think it will be a great loss if this archive will stop
to be publicly available at some point.
It should be preserved."
The archive on irbs.com is simply one individual's helpful contribution to
the net. It's not owned by Dan Hogan or controlled by him. It's not connected
with webkahuna or controlled by them. So it can disappear at any time, and
none of us can affect that except by asking the owner of irbs.com to "keep up
the good work". Dan Allen has kept a long and extensive personal arhive of the
list, and we could convert this into a historical archive similar in style
to the one on irbs.com (I think we should). More generally, modern discussion
group services, as on google, come with a message board functionality
built-in. This serves as its own archive. Have a look at it here:
http://groups.google.com/group/NavList
(following this link does not commit you to signing up). The list
distributes in the usual way, as e-mails, and ALSO allows direct replies via the web
interface.
The archive on irbs.com has suffered the same problems that members of the
list have been dealing with. Between 1 and 2% (by my estimate) of messages
sent to the list do not appear in the archive, and likewise when we follow the
list by e-mail some percentage of messages of about the same order of
magnitude do not reach us. Occasionally the archive misses long stretches of
messages. Just a few weeks ago, the e-mail address for the archive was accidentally
removed from the subscriber list (the same thing happened to Fred Hebard) and
was not re-subscribed for over a week. The messages sent during that time
were interesting, and if you check up on the list by looking in the archive, as
I often do, then you've missed them for good (and you will never know that!
And you will turn up a week or two later saying, 'what's all the fuss? there's
nothing wrong...'). The archive also contains a bunch of "echo posts" that
were sent months ago and then re-distributed in a little explosion last month.
As I noted previously, different list recipients appear to have received
different echo posts, and the posts from months back that appeared last week in
my e-mail inbox are not the same as the ones that turned up the same day on
irbs.com. More or less the same thing happened about six months ago. None of
this is normal. It doesn't have to be this way...
A majority of the recent posters to Navigation-L have now signed up to
NavList (27 out of the 50 e-mail addresses who posted to this list in the past
sixty days). And the total number of unique addresses signed up is 48 (the
additional 21 may be lurkers from the list but also include at least a couple of
people who have stumbled upon it through google. Traffic has been
(intentionally) light.
-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
