FW: off-list idea about archive

After exchanging some messages off-list with Robert Walker we decided these
messages should be posted to metatuning so that others could give input. So
Robert gave me permission and I am now forwarding to this list 4 messages
from our private email, with irrelevancies removed.

So the following forward is the first of 4.

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From: Kurt Bigler <kurt@...>
Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 20:18:32 -0700
To: Robert Walker <robertwalker@...>
Subject: off-list idea about archive

It occurred to me that it is potentially a small step from a web archive to
a full-blown replacement for the yahoo interface. The *main* additional
ingredient needed is the ability to reply. If your solution is flexible
enough to incorporate enough customization to allow reply links, then any
webmail software could be used for the actual replying.

For example I use sqwebmail on my server and it is also highly configurable
in appearance, and the source code is there for the changing if necessary
(something I could do) if the normal customization fails.

Just a thought. If it worked it would mean that many of the problems with
the yahoo interface could be fixed, and it also achieves an interface that
is independent of the choice to use yahoo, and could move forward with us to
other contexts.

And I'm certainly not pushing you to do any work, but to get your input on
feasibility. Eventually I might be able to help you if the idea has any
possibility at all.

Independent of all this (but related in a way) I'm wondering whether your
archive display does colorization of quoting. That would be a nice touch
and something to try to keep in the process of going to a system that
allowed replies, if that turns out to be feasible.

Thanks,
Kurt

(2nd forwarded message in series of 4)

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From: "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@...>
Reply-To: "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@...>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 14:42:14 +0100
To: "Kurt Bigler" <kurt@...>
Subject: Re: off-list idea about archive

Hi Kurt,

> It occurred to me that it is potentially a small step from a web archive to
> a full-blown replacement for the yahoo interface. The *main* additional
> ingredient needed is the ability to reply. If your solution is flexible
> enough to incorporate enough customization to allow reply links, then any
> webmail software could be used for the actual replying.

Unfortunately my software doesn't have this flexibility because of the
way it works. It makes the entire archive in one go from the messages
and then the entire archive needs to be uploaded. Even if you add
a few messages at the end you still have to remake the entire archive
because it has many interconnecting links between the pages
and those all have to be remade. The reason is because the
archive isn't made dynamically.

The thing is that to work like that it would need to create the html
pages dynamically, served up from a database probably. Certainly
that kind of thing can be done as we know, but it isn't my speciality
and someone else would have to write a program like that.

What I wrote was written in Windows C and has to be run on a Windows
operating system to do the actual making of the archive, and isn't
set up to be able to make the pages dynamically, so
unfortunately, I can't do it. What I did is only suitable for
making archives.

>
> For example I use sqwebmail on my server and it is also highly configurable
> in appearance, and the source code is there for the changing if necessary
> (something I could do) if the normal customization fails.
>
> Just a thought. If it worked it would mean that many of the problems with
> the yahoo interface could be fixed, and it also achieves an interface that
> is independent of the choice to use yahoo, and could move forward with us to
> other contexts.

Yes I think the basic idea is a good one. There are scripts around
that do this sort of thing, many of them, some free and some
commercial. I've tried a couple and in fact my web host
has an option to make a discussion list using onne of the
free scripts.

I think there was some discussion of this before.
Some of them are surely better than the yahoogroups interface
- particularly I think a threaded forum would make such
a difference and make it easier to find what you want
when the numger of posts is high.

Maybe when they see the archive there may be more
understanding about how much better another
list could be, and more incentive to work
through the various difficulties involved
in setting one up. For instance, that
if the site belongs to an individual, the individual
may not be able to keep up the commitment
for some reason or may die.

I wonder if Aaron had any ideas?

> And I'm certainly not pushing you to do any work, but to get your input on
> feasibility. Eventually I might be able to help you if the idea has any
> possibility at all.
>
> Independent of all this (but related in a way) I'm wondering whether your
> archive display does colorization of quoting. That would be a nice touch
> and something to try to keep in the process of going to a system that
> allowed replies, if that turns out to be feasible.

Well I can do that with the archive anyway :-).
Easy to do, only took a few minutes, and
I've done it already, for this next upload.
Thanks for the idea!

Robert

(3rd forwarded message in series of 4)

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From: Kurt Bigler <kurt@...>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 13:29:57 -0700
To: Robert Walker <robertwalker@...>
Subject: Re: off-list idea about archive

on 7/19/04 6:42 AM, Robert Walker <robertwalker@...> wrote:

>> And I'm certainly not pushing you to do any work, but to get your input on
>> feasibility. Eventually I might be able to help you if the idea has any
>> possibility at all.
>>
>> Independent of all this (but related in a way) I'm wondering whether your
>> archive display does colorization of quoting. That would be a nice touch
>> and something to try to keep in the process of going to a system that
>> allowed replies, if that turns out to be feasible.
>
> Well I can do that with the archive anyway :-).
> Easy to do, only took a few minutes, and
> I've done it already, for this next upload.
> Thanks for the idea!

Great! You are of course a good person to give an idea to, based on past
experiences on the tunings list.

One thing that occurred to me is that the entire set of web pages can
probably be run through a text filter that might be able to add the reply
links automatically. The only trick is the email addresses that should be
obscured become present in the email links unless you also do a level of
encoding, and that *does* require a database. However the filter might
generate the database for mapping numeric codes to email addresses. But
this requires server-side work to keep it really hidden, or a custom webmail
solution that is running on the same server and can read the database. Hope
that makes sense. Anyway the shortcut would be to have the email addresses
semi-protected via some javascript tricks that keep them from being directly
harvested by robots. An easy thing to do would be to allow a mailto reply
link or variant thereof that provides anti-harvesting feature. Then with no
webmail interface people could still reply to messages from the archive as
long as they are setup for mailto to work, which probably most people are,
tho in internet cafes probably not.

Anyway, regarding a filter, I could probably help some with that.

-Kurt

>
> Robert
>
>
>
>
>
>

(4th forwarded message in series of 4)

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From: "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@...>
Reply-To: "Robert Walker" <robertwalker@...>
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 22:20:45 +0100
To: "Kurt Bigler" <kurt@...>
Subject: Re: off-list idea about archive

Hi Kurt,

Yes, perhaps with some work we could
figure out some way to enable replies to e-mails,
which is secure. However, since the archive
isn't made dynamically, we are still faced
with the problem of how to integrate the
replies into the archive.

Unfortunately, because of the way
the archive is made,
even if it is just necessary
to add a few extra posts to it then
many (not all) of the pages need
to be regeneraed and uploaded
each time. You are certainly talking
about MBs to be uploaded every time
for a list as big as Tuning.
So that's not practical, and I can't
see any way around it with the
archive that I've made.

However, there are attractive commercial
solutions that can be used which may
well be better than Yahoo groups
for our purposes.

This is an example of a commercial discussion board
- you can use it for free, but it is probably
best to buy it as you then get more useful features.
For instance, users can join themselves if you
get the pro. version, also they can delete
their own posts if they want to.

It doesn't cost much to get - just a one off fee
of $150:

Here it is:
http://www.robertinventor.com/fts_discuss/index.html

Also an experimental post to show some of its features
- you can do tables which could be useful.
http://host98.ipowerweb.com/~robertin/fts_discuss/messages/8/16.html?1067452
542

It also has various special characters:

http://host98.ipowerweb.com/~robertin/cgi-bin/fts_discuss/discus.cgi?pg=form
atting

Even has summation and integration there with option to set the
limits as well, for the mathematicians amongst
us :-).

This one as you see has never been used but that
is just because I never got around to putting a link
to it on my site anywhere where anyone could find it easily.
I'll probably add it in presently.

If you buy the commercial version of it then you can
backup the messages, and restore them to another site
if you want to move it. That could deal with the
question people have about whether it should
be on a private web space.

It is the forum software used by my software
reseller RegNow and they have clearly used
it for years with no problems, so I'm
confident it is well made. They will
also have met security issues and
dealt with them.

It is done from the server side as a cgi
script so I think there will be no problem
about e-mail addresses being displayed
on web pages.

Robert