[R-390] EMail List Forum stay at QTH.net or move to Groups.io

[Larry H]

Thanks Jerry, good info.

In order to estimate the size of the file the complete R-390 list archive
would be, I calculated the approximate size of the Pearls files made by Wei
Li for our website. It's about 51 MB uncompressed and that is about 3/4 of
the total posts in the archive, so the size of the archives would be about
68 MB.

Here's how I obtain most of the information from the R-390 Email Reflector
Forum archives. This is documented in my document on our
website called: R-390x Newbie Support Information.  I use 2 methods to do
so:
1. The HHI Email Reflector Search Tool accessed with the internet link:
http://www.w9wze.net/ReflectorSearch/SearchReflectorForm.php .

Because it searches all of the archive, it takes a couple minutes to
provide the list. To see the item of interest from the list, just click on
the highlighted link. You can search the titles and/or authors with 1 or 2
keywords specifying AND or OR operators.

2. The built-in method in the 'Mailman' tool that provides the function for
our Email Reflector Forum. Here's how I access the R-390 list of the
archived entries from an internet window:
http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/r-390/ . If you want to display
information for a different product group, just replace the 'r-390' with
it's name, such as: Collins, Hammarlund, National, Hallicrafters, Heathkit,
Eico, QRP, etc. It displays a table of entries for each month. You can
display the month's forum entries in a list sorted by: thread, subject,
author or date (by clicking on those keywords). From that 2nd list you can
display a desired post entry.

Being able to search the content of the posts would be very helpful
because many times the title is not indicative of the content.  This
happens once in a while for a few different good reasons.

I like the idea of using the Groups.IO search tools, but the question is
what to do about searching the existing archive.  I  really don't relish
the idea of  keeping the archive on my disk and using yet another search
tool (unless it comes with Kielbasa) as a solution.  I like the results of
the HHI tool, but it does not search content.

Ideas anyone?

Regards, Larry

On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 7:30 AM <jsternmd at att.net> wrote:

> Hi Larry,
>
> Migrating the old archive to Groups.IO is not feasible as I understand.
> The
> Collins Collector Group Reflector list made this migration and have not
> been
> able to transfer their old Reflector archive which appears quite similar to
> the qth.net mail list format.  I can concatenate all the monthly R-390
> archives into 1 large text file.  There are many free logical text search
> tools available but not sure if they would remain "free" for use on a
> public
> website.  Also bear in mind that the archives contain lots of content that
> have little historical value.  Searching would still take some time, for
> example if I wanted to find a thread on PTO restoration, it would take a
> modest effort to find a relevant 'hit' and then to copy the subject title
> and do a secondary search on that specific thread title.  It's a bit clunky
> but when you need to find valuable old advice it can work well.   I did
> this
> with the old collections (pre-digital print) of the Collins Signal, where I
> used OCR and then put them all into a large single file.  I use Copernic, a
> personal free search tool then to find relevant subject matter.  I also
> started doing this with the old 73 Magazine issues where I used Adobe
> Acrobat to perform OCR to render searchable text.  Where there's will
> there's a way.
>
> Jerry NY2KW
>
>