P3D Re: Re the searchable archive is excellent

[Marco Pauck <pauck@xxxxxx>]

abram klooswyk wrote:
[...]
> I agree it is a nice service, still I have some questions,
> on which I hope I can be reassured.

OK, let me try to answer them.

> 1. Will it last?

Well, it's a *free* service to the community and I won't guarantee
anything ... ;-)

On the other hand, after setting up this service (which took far
more time than I had planned) it's running more or less without
manual maintenance. Disk space is cheap, and it's part of my own
site which I have full control over, i.e. not a limited free
homepage service that may change or go out of business tomorrow.

BTW: I also try to keep the URLs of the individual messages fixed,
so that you can directly reference them from your own messages or
web pages.

> OK, nothing will, but I do hope Bob Wier continues to update
> the "official" archives at
> http://www.calcite.rocky.edu/photo-3d/
> Those archives are complete for Photo-3D and Tech-3D,
> I understand. Somehow I have more confidence in their
> persistence.

It's always good to have alternatives to choose from, and Calcite
is clearly the home and main archive of this list.

The content should be identical as I used Bob's archive for the
inital loading. Differences are mainly regarding update schedule,
message format (digest vs. single msg), navigation, and search
capabilites.

> 2. Will the e-mail addresses on Marco Pauck's site be captured
> by some internet robot and delivered to junk mail senders?
> There is no password to enter, and the individual messages can
> be reached by just clicking, which robots are good at.

This may indeed be the case. There are several alternatives to deal
with this concern:

1. Ask the robots (via the robot exclusion standard) not to access
   the archive. Well-behaving robots such as Scooter from AltaVista
   respect this. However, this way the archive won't be searchable
   by their search engines and mail-address-grabbing robots are
   probably not well-behaving anyway.

2. Drop the browsing and navigation features and make the search
   engine-access 'robot-unfriendly'. I my opinion, this will be a
   significant limitation of the service.

3. Restrict access to the archive to authorized members. Beside the
   pain that this has to be maintained somehow, I really want to be
   the service free for *everyone*, not just a closed group.

At least for me, all these alternatives are not very convincing, so
none of them is implemented.

However, you can decide for *yourself* if you want your messages to
by archived: if you set the mail header "X-No-Archive", you messages
to the list will not be archived here (don't know about Bob's archive).

Everything is up to you, simply make your choice.
And thanks to everyone for providing the valuable content that makes
archiving desirable.

	Marco
-- 
Marco Pauck - WMD GmbH Hamburg, Germany - http://www.pauck.de/marco/
e-mail: marco@xxxxxxxx, phone: +49-40-58958-120, fax: +49-40-58958-199
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
and wrong.  -- H. L. Mencken