I would think that archive.org would do the job if we asked them to?
Else, this is a natural for a grant...
On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Thus spake "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law"
<froomkin(_at_)law(_dot_)miami(_dot_)edu>
I have just run into an example of this (POISSON) when I was unable to
find the archive. I was surprised -- and puzzled. Surely the storage
costs for archiving ALL IETF lists, especially in their spamless form,
can't be that great? What sort of volume are we talking about ?
Depends on the list; the main IETF list is over 1.5MB/mo in my personal
archives. Given that the WG lists are maintained by volunteers, it would be
a significant cost to provide several years of archives out of the list
maintainer's pocket, especially when you add in the trolls and spam which
are not part of the list's relevant content.
2. The volume of spam in a bounced-messages archive would quickly
change your mind.
Here, you could well be right. But would that have to be held beyond the
life of the group?
If you consider the bounced messages to be legitimate content worth
archiving, then their archive should be kept as long as the non-bounced
archive.
3. All of this would be easily solved by someone (e.g. IETF
secretariat)
providing list service for all WGs with a consistent policy.
Agree. But I'd like to also suggest that part of this policy is keeping
the (unspammed) archives around, if only for the sake of people (like
me) who try sometimes to write the history of decision-making in some
of these areas.
I agree. I've petitioned several times for centralized lists and archives,
and have even offerred to provide them free to all WGs, but so far the IESG
has taken no action. My guess is there's nobody we all trust to be such a
central manager -- right now one of the IESG members is being accused of
list mismanagement.
S
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