NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: An experimental Navigation List
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Apr 12, 20:08 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Apr 12, 20:08 EDT
Alex E, you wrote: "Sorry, I did not follow this discussion from the beginning, but I see that there is a motion to move the list to another server (or to start another list). My main concern is: "What will happen to the archive of this current list???" I think it will be a great loss if this archive will stop to be publicly available at some point. It should be preserved." The archive on i-DEADLINK-com is simply one individual's helpful contribution to the net. It's not owned by Dan Hogan or controlled by him. It's not connected with webkahuna or controlled by them. So it can disappear at any time, and none of us can affect that except by asking the owner of i-DEADLINK-com to "keep up the good work". Dan Allen has kept a long and extensive personal arhive of the list, and we could convert this into a historical archive similar in style to the one on i-DEADLINK-com (I think we should). More generally, modern discussion group services, as on google, come with a message board functionality built-in. This serves as its own archive. Have a look at it here: http://groups.google.com/group/NavList (following this link does not commit you to signing up). The list distributes in the usual way, as e-mails, and ALSO allows direct replies via the web interface. The archive on i-DEADLINK-com has suffered the same problems that members of the list have been dealing with. Between 1 and 2% (by my estimate) of messages sent to the list do not appear in the archive, and likewise when we follow the list by e-mail some percentage of messages of about the same order of magnitude do not reach us. Occasionally the archive misses long stretches of messages. Just a few weeks ago, the e-mail address for the archive was accidentally removed from the subscriber list (the same thing happened to Fred Hebard) and was not re-subscribed for over a week. The messages sent during that time were interesting, and if you check up on the list by looking in the archive, as I often do, then you've missed them for good (and you will never know that! And you will turn up a week or two later saying, 'what's all the fuss? there's nothing wrong...'). The archive also contains a bunch of "echo posts" that were sent months ago and then re-distributed in a little explosion last month. As I noted previously, different list recipients appear to have received different echo posts, and the posts from months back that appeared last week in my e-mail inbox are not the same as the ones that turned up the same day on i-DEADLINK-com. More or less the same thing happened about six months ago. None of this is normal. It doesn't have to be this way... A majority of the recent posters to Navigation-L have now signed up to NavList (27 out of the 50 e-mail addresses who posted to this list in the past sixty days). And the total number of unique addresses signed up is 48 (the additional 21 may be lurkers from the list but also include at least a couple of people who have stumbled upon it through google. Traffic has been (intentionally) light. -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars