Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic Re: Tuning archives

Hi Aaron and Rick,

I've got all the posts ever sent to the tuning list
in digests or other form. I've been kind of unofficially
archiving it since joining. I used earlier digests from
Manuel and Monz to complete the collection..

I also wrote a program to make an html archive of it.
There though I did ask people's permission to include
their posts. Some posters to the main tuning list
feel very strongly that they don't want their posts
archived. So it has to be opt in.

Yahoogroups can put them up on their website
because they get permission from us all to do so
when we join. People who write programs to
download an archive of other people's posts
without their permission are on somewhat
dubious ground I think. At least out of
respect I for one wouldn't do that.
But searching the yahoogroups archive
is okay I think because the posts
remain in their original location
and aren't copied. The posts are all
the copyright of the original posters.

I know that Google archived usenet
or something, and that it caches some
yahoogroups posts in its search
engine. But presumably they have
gone into it with top notch lawyers
and know it is okay to do it for
some reason or other. Whether it
is leagally okay or not I think
one should ask permission.
I know of several posters to
the tuning list who told me privately
that they felt strongly that they
didn't want their posts in the archive.

I gather that mainly the point of view is
that they posted them as ephemeral posts
and not as finished publications.
They would be interested perhaps in
contributing considered finished material
to a properly conducted tuning faq or
some such - but not in contributing raw
chatty unconsidered posts to an archive.

It is a minority view, only a few think like that,
but those who do sometimes feel
very strongly about it.

Technically it is a bit tricky because once
you get permission you still have
to recognise the poster in the archives
and e-mail address often change.
So one can get gaps in the archives
even from posters who have given their
permission sometimes.

Anyway - on this point - I still
have my archiving program and all
the digests. Also now I also have
the space on-line too (it needed over
100 Mb when converted to html with all
the indexes by subject, date, and author)

I also have permission from many of
the main posters to the list to include their posts.
So I can do an archive and upload
it quite quickly. I haven't done
that mainly because there were
bugs in the old Mills section of the
archive that needed to be fixed first.

But if there is a strong wish for it
now then I can do it right away
with the bugs. They probably won't
get fixed any time soon unfortunately
because of other commitmemnts and they were
relatively tricky ones to fix. But not so very major.
Maybe some of the old Mills posts
will get concatenated or duplicated
or something, maybe even wrongly
attributed in the index so you
click on an entry and end up with
a post from someone different from
who you expect. I'm not sure,
though it was long ago now and
can't remember the details.
It only affected the Mills archives
and not the more recent yahoogroups
postings and was something to do with the
difference in the format of the digests
and coping with small variations
in the format, but I can't
remember the details now.

The yahoogroups ones are easy because each
message ends with:
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

and you just need to search for that to split them
up.

The posts might even be searchable - could all be
put into one folder in text format - but would
have gaps because of the opt in nature
so one would need to choose between a possibly
faster search of text files in a folder
on a server that maybe could even host the script
too - and the completeness of the yahoogroups archives.

Robert

Re: Tuning archives

🔗Robert Walker <robertwalker@...>

🔗Carl Lumma <ekin@...>