22846 - [RFE] web-based archive of posts to mozilla.* newsgroups

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations, task, P5)

Description

[Garth Wallace]

It would be enormously helpful if mozilla.org provided an archive of past
messages on the mozilla.* newsgroup hierarchy. USENET is not an archival
system, so you can't tell when a message will be deleted from the server.
Having them on the web would allow people to link to messages as references
without the link breaking because the netnews server purged the message.

Comment 1

[Mitchell Baker]

reassigning to dmose, who has background on mozilla newsgroups.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

There are several answers to this.

a) we feed deja.com directly so that such an archive does exist

b) news.mozilla.org has not yet expired any articles from the mozilla hierarchy.
   I wouldn't be surprised if we had to do this in the not-too-distant future.

c) at some point, we hope to migrate to another mailing-list manager which has
web features, possibly SYMPA.  when that happens, it would be easy to set such a
thing up.

Because of item c), I'm reassigning this bug to rko.

Comment 3

[Risto Kotalampi]

www.deja.com is a good news archive; I don't see why we should try to invent the 
wheel again.

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

> www.deja.com is a good news archive; I don't see why we should try to invent
> the wheel again.

<http://salon.com/tech/log/2000/06/20/deja/>

That's why.

Who wants a bet that Deja will never get around to putting its archive back up 
before it goes bankrupt? Reopening.

Comment 5

[Risto Kotalampi]

It's totally up to the newsgroup administrators to implement something like 
this. Development support team don't have resources for this. Moving this to 
Marya's queue who is one of our "core services" team member and knows more about 
USENET servers.

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I don't have access to news.mozilla.org either. A HTML gateway would be useful,
but I would prefer bug 31514 to be fixed.

[slightly OT]
> would allow people to link to messages as references

Personally, I prefer links to news.mozilla.org (e.g.
<news://news.mozilla.org/myid>). I can copy and edit them to access the snews
serevr and have the full thread in my known environment and don't have to figure
out how to use the webmail app and post using textareas.

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

[OT]
> I wouldn't be surprised if we had to do this in the not-too-distant future.

No, please don't. Never.

Comment 8

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

It looks like Deja has gotten some part of it's archive back up, I just did a 
search & found posts of mine from about a year ago.

But one thing we're hoping to do in the future is upgrade our mailing list 
software to one that supports LDAP (possibly SYMPA).  And hopefully whatever 
software we choose will support mailing-list archives.  So with luck, we'll be 
able to actually do reasonable HTML archiving from the mailing list side of the 
house in the future.

Marya, if you don't want this bug, feel free to reassign it to me.

Comment 9

[Marya Schroeder]

Thanks Dan.
I just got back from a vacation and am still catching up.  If you don't mind 
taking care of this, that would be great. passing ticket back to dmose.
thanks, marya

Comment 10

[Dawn Endico]

reassigning to dmose's proper account

Comment 11

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Mass reassign of mozilla.org infrastructure bugs, as I'm switching groups to
work on LDAP integration in Mozilla full-time.

Comment 12

[Dawn Endico]

This requires our new news server setup.

Comment 13

[Dawn Endico]

upping the priority and severity of this because deja.com has notified us
that they have discontinued our news feed, the site is down and we no
longer have a searchable archive for our newsgroups. Assigning to nobody
so it will show up on the proper radars along with the rest of our dangling 
IS tasks.

Comment 14

[Dawn Endico]

Note that the lack of an archive breaks newsbot. Newsbot presently links to
articles at deja.com. http://mozilla.org/newsbot/

whatever archiving software we use needs to allow lookup by message-id
newsbot can link to a particular mail message like this
http://www.deja.com/[LB=http://www.mozilla.org/]/msgid.xp?MID=<[e-mail]>

and viewing threads like this:
http://www.deja.com/[LB=http://www.mozilla.org/]/thread/[e-mail]%3e%231/1

Comment 15

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

http://www.mail-archive.com/

Comment 16

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> whatever archiving software we use needs to allow lookup by message-id
> newsbot can link to a particular mail message like this
>   and viewing threads like this:

Didn't see that. I don't think, the Mail Archive can do that yet, but you may be
able to talk to the maintainer (seems to be an open-source guy).

Comment 17

[Risto Kotalampi]

Google bought deja's news service. I'd not spin up this service ourselves and 
rely on Google.

Comment 18

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> we no longer have a searchable archive for our newsgroups

The mozilla.org news server archives everything from day one. (That's how it
*must* be.) You can search a new server, not?

Comment 19

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Risto: Note that Google did *not* yet made the deja archive available. Posts
date back only to Aug 2000, when Google started to archive itself.