As I have been recently googling for MUD-Dev posts and have been unable to find them, I am pretty certain that there are no full and accessible MUD-Dev archives on the internet. The most complete archive is a mirror of a site that put up an HTML page for each post on the list.

Because of this, I have been working on converting those posts into a standard mbox email archive. Once that is perfected, the next step is to generate browsable Mailman style mailing list archives. The prototype code for all this is working at the moment, although I still have to address issues inherited both from the original mailing list (incorrect posting dates) and the mirrored site (HTML markup wraps anything vaguely markable in the original posts).

Does anyone else have any practical suggestions for useful things to do with this data, while I am knee deep in it?

http://muddev.wishes.net/

Heh, as if you need some more data ;). Tyche has been kind enough to archive most of it, though I think it's also in individual html posts. http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=file...

This is worse than the format in the archive IMHO. Awkward forcing of information into an arbitrary forum interface. Broken search. I was aware of this and dismissed it entirely. If you view it as adding value, then that's your prerogative.

These look like the archives downloaded from my web site, which I downloaded from the MUD-Dev web site back in the day. If so, then they are missing posts (empty pages) and in addition to obviously only reaching 2002 (MUD-Dev effectively died in 2004 and the archive I linked to above has posts to that date).

It's full and it's accessible. I was unaware that you were aware of it, hence I thought it would add value. You're welcome by the way.

http://muddev.wishes.net/ seems to have a functioning search for me. I did a search for EverQuest and it returned the correct results.

I did a search for an uncommon word and was told that it was too common to search for. If it arbitrarily and unreasonably decides this on my first search, then any subsequent searches are IMO likely to randomly entail the same result.

Thank you for your reply, but we will have to differ on the respective amounts of value we place on what you linked to.

What about Google? Looks like Google has a lot of the site cached (if not all).
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS...

Google (not limited to wishes.net) is where I first turned. However, Google does not appear to have many of the posts I have searched for, indexed. Not in my hosted mirror at disinterest.org, or in the forum at wishes.net. If they were to be indexed, they would have been by now. They are not indexed on my site because of empty files, in addition to it only going up to 2002. I do not know why they are not indexed from wishes.net.

Well I have the posts from 3/30/2004 to 2/26/2006 laying about here somewhere. 2006 was when it went bye bye, and several people started mud-dev2.
The archive here on mudbytes is one that JC made in 2002 and might be missing a few posts by intention. At least I know a set of off-topical posts were not archived, but I wasn't aware that any "on-topic" posts were not present in the archives.

Was there much from that period? Or is it the token discussion that happens sporadically on the list these days? If it is the former, it would be good to get a hold of them if you can spare the time to locate them.

I've checked the empty files on my hosted mirror, and they appear to be present and not empty in your archive. It is therefore more than likely that they are also not empty in the copies I also downloaded from kanga.nu back in the day, and the problem is that something has corrupted the extracted files on disk. Excellent. This means that I can use them as a better source for the period they cover.

This sounds like a "feature" of phpBB where it determines if a word is too common based on how many posts it appears in. If you search for "mud" for example you get that result. This behaviour should be configurable by the board administrator, but in most cases it's probably what you want.

I'm not trying to knock your efforts or convert you to using the wishes forum, but I don't think it's really as bad as you seem to think! :tongue:

When searching functionality like that used in this case chooses not to search, but to give a generic message about constraints and the possibility of what was entered being too common, then this is often inscrutable and unreasonable. If I had searched for one of the most common words, like "mud", then this would have been reasonable. But I did not search for "mud", I searched for "yospe". Life is too short to wonder why this is common, or how likely other uncommon words are considered common in this particular case.

This is all tangential and irrelevant in any case. This project is now as much about translating the emails into a form which myself and others can process directly, as it is producing another mirror in a custom format.

I signed up for MudDev on 6/28/04, so I have everything from that point on, till the final post in 2/24/06. They're on my Gmail account. Anyway you can select lotsa posts and export them? I'd be more than willing to create some kinda archive of what I have.

Setup POP for Gmail and get the emails in a client?

POP or IMAP in gmail and export them out.

Wow, a 47 minute ninja. :tongue:

No ninja, I just felt the need to post.