>I've been perusing the archives, and just tried the search function.... wow! >Much clearer than before, jumps right to the message, sorts the search by >how good of a match! We finally have the messages back to 1994 as a >resource that is usable. > >Thanks Andy! You're welcome! I've been setting up the new server for quite a while now and the main reason for the delay was the format of the pianotech archives. I decided that since pianotech was one of our most valued assets, the archives really needed to be there and working well before cutting over to the new server. For those of you interested, here's a list of the highlights that happened during this process: - I found that the Mailman software had never archived so many messages, so I had to get in and fix many bugs in the code that caused it die. The bugs needed fixing and I'll be giving the fixes back to the Mailman maintainers. - I found that Mailman's cool archives did not allow a search form at the top. Another fix. - I found that majordomo had stripped some information from the top of messages I needed, so I went back to my personal archives. - Many messages had wrong dates in them (years like 1904, or 2011, some from y2k bugs, I think) and Mailman kept trying to create folders for those dates. I thought that looked confusing so I had to fix them by assigning them dates from messages that came in around the same time. - I found the search engine we were using also had problems dealing with the list archives and I had to fix a bug there. (It took over 20 hours to index the archives before the bug fix, now it takes about an hour.) - I wrote a program to take my personal archives, sift out all the messages for pianotech, ptg-l, caut, humor, and ce-l, fix all the problems, and produce a file that Mailman could handle. - Running the Mailman archiver on the pianotech file takes about 6 hours! So each time I hit a bug I had to fix it and start the run again. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out -- I think the archives are organized in a more sensical way and searching works well. I expect we'll run into more "scaling" problems over time, since the archives are so big, but I'll do my best to keep on top of it. If we do hit some showstopper problem, I can always move the past archives to a separate location and start over (so there would be two places you'd look for old messages) but I'm trying to avoid it if at all possible. The one issue I'm not happy with is that I changed the name of all the archive files from the old majordomo names to the new names. That's fine when you're reading them, but if you go to a search engine and find an old URL it will give you an annoying "not found" error when you try to look at it. I'm thinking about a creative fix for that. Go back and read some of those old 1994 messages! I found it really interesting to find discussions that I've seen a few times on the list and certainly some great information there... -andy
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