[BALUG-Admin] list settings? ...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):

> Since BALUG is acronym, rather than name, I prefer to keep it
> with uppercase for that portion ... and the portion right after
> the hyphen (-), and particularly in that context, probably makes
> reasonable sense / better fit, with an initial cap there ... and
> so it is, also has been that way a long time.

OK, so be it.

> Yes, good considerations.  Unfortunately the logic runs contrary to
> some of the list data.  Notably BALUG-Announce and BALUG-Admin (I'll
> have to review the data again, though, this is off-the-top-of-my-head)
> have been the least screwed up by DreamHost.com - notably we may have
> *all* the messages from those lists (or nearly so), and hence it would
> be good to preserve backwards compatibility on the URLs.  I do already
> have the redirects in place for that - so as long as the sequence
> numbers line up, the old URLs will redirect to the same messages ...
> at least after reinjecting those messages, and after lists.balug.org.
> has been moved over to the new host location.

You may very well find that the sequence numbers will _not_ line up.
It's very vexing, but Mailman's bin/arch utility just does that
sometimes and it's difficult to determine why.

I think this is more likely than not, for balug-talk.  Please make a
point of checking upon rebuild, and if the numeric sequencing has
changed, consider whether switching to Quarterly (vice Monthly) might be
an aesthetic improvement.

It's a judgement call related to average message traffic.  A monthly
pipermail archive with four to six messages in a typical month looks a
bit silly, and would suggest greater chunk size.  Of course, then you
could find that suddenly message traffic spikes and you get a quarterly
chunk with 400 messages in it.

Anyway, all I ask is, _if_ balug-talk ends up with largely renumbered
archives, consider larger chunking, because IMO the monthly pipermail
chunks looked pretty thin, most months.

In any event, I _greatly_ doubt that anyone has permalinks to
balug-announce postings that we want to avoid breaking.  So, 'URLs of
old postings would change' IMO is true but irrelevant for that archive.
You be the judge.

> In the meantime, for temp.balug.org, robots.txt tells the search
> engines to *not* index the archives (less they get confused as numbers
> will shift relative to what's presently on temp.balug.org)

On balance, probably wise.

> And BALUG-Talk is the one DreamHost.com most thoroughly screwed up.

Exactly.  Which in my experience suggests that, among other things,
after you've gotten through merging in everything you can find in the
way of back traffic, little or none of that will have preserved archived
numbering.  As you say.

> But it's highest volume, so ought probably stay at monthly anyway.

Dunno.  Consider the matter, is all I ask.  Look at a few months of the
existing back messages archive, and picture in your mind whether it'd
look better if the typical chunk length were a bit more than doubled.
If yes, then Quarterly is indicated.

It can make a significant difference in aesthetic effect, _and_ subtly
convey the impression of listadmin mindfulness instead of people who are
just being doofuses and mindlessly following defaults as do all the
world's technophobes.  (I cringe when I see LUGs' Mailman lists with
names having initial capital letters for no reason whatsoever other than
using unexamined GNU Mailman defaults and the listadmins being asleep at
the wheel.  I get embarrassed on their behalf.)


> And the other lists, lower volume, so by that quarter or yearly would
> be good, but as those list (at least I think?) are mostly not missing
> messages, changing that would break all the (individual message)
> linkage.

Which I estimate will not matter in the least, because it's going to be
very unlikely that people will have external hyperlinks to individual
postings in them.

The most debatable of the three would be this one, balug-admin, but I'll
bet if you search for external links to it, you'll find none that even
remotely matter.

(Don't worry about 'we'll confuse Google'.  That fixes itself, trust
me.)

> Should decide before lists.balug.org. moves over.  But other than that
> I think either sounds fine for BALUG-Test.  What say ye?
> Preference/recommendation on BALUG-Test?  I'm totally open on that
> one.

Yearly, definitely.

If the unlikely happens and there's a huge 2017 chunk, all you need do
is change to a different chunk size and regenerate.  Nobody is going to
have permalinks, so it doesn't matter.