Hi Mike, I don't know if you got my email on archiving the silverlist. Maybe my new email service still has some kinks in it, so I'll try posting this.
Archives are extremely valuable. They permit newcomers to browse them and search for information, and to learn much more than they could without them. That's how I got started, and the information I got from reading Tai-Pan and the others was invaluable. Newcomers often ask the same questions over and over again. People get tired of giving the same answers, and a lot of good information never gets passed along. For example, David has some very eloquent arguments regarding Argyria, but he simply has refrained from wasting his time in the recent discussions on this topic. I'm sure others may feel the same. However, if the posts were archived, it would be easy to collect the best discussions and simply point to them in a post. Having archives means keeeping a lot of good information that now gets lost. Links to important information, favorite products, descriptions of procedures, results of experiments, and other valuable information could be kept safe for everyone to use. Browsing the archives often prompts questions that can lead to discovery of new information. This is much less likely when the posts are read once and possible discarded or perhaps saved somewhere on your hard disk. But if you do save them, how do you search them efficiently? I hope this gives some good reasong why the silverlist should be archived. But the suggestion I made to use Google Groups turns out to be a bad idea. Google deliberately design the software to make it impossible to do what needs to be done. In prticular, they ony allow searches in web pages, not in files. This means a new page would have to be created for each post, and the contents pasted into the page. That would be too much work for anyone. But I found another solution. There is a free mail list archiver that provides all the features we need. It indexes the posts by date or thread, and has excellent search features, much better than the old eskimo search that only allowed one word and it had to be longer than three characters. Here is an example of a date index: Messages by Date <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html> and an example of a threaded index: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/index.html> The service had been available since 1998, and is supported by advertising. The equipment is excellent, and they do backups often. They allow you to download the archives so you can keep your own local storage. Their uptime is excellent, and they have uptime records going back many years. The operation is highly professional and is the best of all the similar operations I was able to find. They strip the headers and email address from the post so email harvesters cannot grab the email address and spam everyone on the list. They do provide a button at the bottom of the post so people can contact the poster. This exposes the email address, but I guess it is not much different than subscribing to the silverlist when all the addresses are exposed to anyone who receives the posts. If you look at a typical post, you can see they stripped the headers and provide the search function on each page: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg07053.html> The best part comes last. You don't have to jump through hoops to start archiving the messages. Just subscribe them as you would for any person, and they do the rest. Here's the blurb on their home page: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Archive your mailing list Looking for an easy way to turn your mailing list into a searchable archive? Just add [email protected] as a member to your mailing list as described in the how-to-guide. http://www.mail-archive.com/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I hope this reaches you, and you will consider giving them a try. Best Regards, Mike M. -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Address Off-Topic messages to: [email protected] The Silver List and Off Topic List archives are currently down... List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
