On 24 Feb 11:26, James Bensley wrote:
On 24 February 2010 09:36, mick mbm@rlogin.net wrote:
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:57:41 +0000 Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk allegedly wrote:
Well any of the list admins (there are a few) could get a list of current subscribers manually. Archives are available to all as gzipped files and to be honest backup of these needn't be kept 100% up to date because recent messages will already exist in multiple mailboxes amongst the subscribers, as I say I have back to 2003 in a more or less complete state and I can't be the only one.
How about adding the list to marc.info? Not only would be get an on-line archive, but also a potentially wider readership (=promotion).
Mick
Both of your suggestions are valid suggestions but this means someone needs to write a script to scan through emails either in your inbox (in waynes case) or in a list archive (as per Mick's recommendation) and pull out senders addresses, compile them in a list and then remove any duplicates. This would give us a list of subscribed users apart from anyone that has unsubscribed would then be re-subscribed if we used this script output to recompile the list members. So you could either extend you script to remove and addresses that have sent an email with "unsubscribe" in the subject to the mailing list address (or what ever the criteria is) or a list admin could just once a month or one a quarter tar up the list subscribers which to me seems much more straight forward, quicker and accurate?
The list of subscribers is *not* the same as the list of people that have posted... We have some long time lurkers (I'm sure). So, using a scan through the archive would be a very bad way of deducing the subscriber list. Also, many addresses in there may no longer exist (e.g. iDunno@sommitrealweird.fsnet.co.uk - my address before I got a real domain name... when I was using freeserve dialup).
We already have an online archive... it's, erm, at: http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/
Ho hum,