[Balug-admin] I'd like to help

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (mp@rawbw.com):

> To do / wish list items (not necessarily a complete list):
>
> Mailing lists - get the "old(er)" publicly accessible list archives
> back on-line.

I'm wondering if maybe Michael didn't get the old mbox file from David
Sifry, and then either he or dreamhost.net/dreamhost.com attempted to 
regenerate the pipermail archive from there.  The reason I speculate
that is that the "March 2005" HTML archive appears to have fragments of
really old, prior years' posts that I recognise among the fifteen "No
subject" entries.

I hope Michael will clarify.  If he has the mbox files, then we're in
good shape for the long term, and it's just a matter of cleanup.  (I'd
like to get a copy of the cumulative mbox file, in fact.)

> Consistent URLs - seems the URLs of the archives have bounced about
> The latest round of *replacement* list names are significantly longer
> e-mail addresses (both local part and domain) - we should carefully
> consider what they should be for the "permanent" e-mail addresses used
> for each list, and carefully work to get to that goal (e.g.
> balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org
> is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address
> for a BALUG talk list)

I would suggest, IMVAO, that the recent change combines good with bad.
Thanks to Michael's kind explanation, the "balug-talk-balug.org" part is
explained as a dreamhost-ism.  Bad (to be corrected later).

I'd maintain that the "lists.balug.org" part is good, and is what should
have been done originally.  That is, one should ideally use "role" CNAME
records (or A records, where SMTP is involved) for each distinct major
public function that a host will serve.  This level of indirect
addressing lets you reassign individual roles when necessary to different 
underlying hosts, smoothly transitioning them just by editing DNS
records (and then waiting a while for caches to time out).

So, I'd urge _not_ simplifying back to "balug.org", for the list
addresses.