[lbo-talk] ADMINISTRIVIA - Latest upgrade to mailing list and archive software

Jordan Hayes jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com
Tue Jan 20 14:13:03 PST 2004


Last weekend we brought the mailing list and archive software up to a more modern version, so I thought I'd send out a little update with some information. First, the new features:

- Some more tools for Doug to help moderate the flow

This is a very active list, so getting some help was a priority ...

General information is at http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/

- The archives got a facelift

. 2003's postings have been moved out to a new directory, so you'll

see just by-week listings in the main index; click on the 2003

link to browse last year's posts (and likewise for 1998 ... 2002)

. For those of you who only read the list via the archives, you can

now click on the sender of a post to reply to the list: it has a

mailto: URL with the Subject (and sometimes threading info, not

sure yet why it's sometime and not others)

. Users who don't have their name in the From: header (notoriously

AOL users) now get credited for their posts a bit better (and thus

are able to be searched better)

- The search engine got updated

. You can now sort by posting date (and it's the default)

Note that this search engine is much more accuate than Google is, since the archive files get renamed from time to time (and Google doesn't stop by as often as we'd like). The index is updated every 10 minutes all day long. Search directly from most pages in the archive, or go to:

http://search.lbo-talk.org/

Now some statistics:

- The archives are well over 1GB of text and attachments (the months

of September and October of 2001 leading the way with over 20MB each) - Hosts in at least 60 countries have surfed the archives - More than half the days in December 2003 there were over 100 posts

(Average day: 83 posts) - 286 unique hosts performed searches so far this month/year - 505 unique hosts searched in December - About 40 hosts perform searches at least once per day - About 5 of them are heavy users of the search feature (10+/day) - There have been about 7400 searches since we made it available

And finally, a followup about the Google ads on the archive pages. No one was either bothered or enthused enough about them to send us any feedback; we've been delivering about 5000 ads per day and getting very few clickthroughs (5-10?). I'm actually amused by which ads get generated quite often: yesterday's post about confusing John Edwards and John Edward immediately generated ads to get tickets to see the TV Psychic!

As usual send comments, suggestions, kudos and complaints to lbo-talk-owner at lbo-talk.org

Doug && Jordan



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