Cohousing-L Mailing List: Mining / searching Cohousing-L archives

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

On Tue, 5 May 2015 Allison Tom wrote in a message with  subject:
management services vs self-management at the building stage

>I have tried to collate this information by reviewing the list archives, but as
>others have commented here, it's a difficult resource to mine, and this is
>especially difficult for those of use who aren't longtime members with memory
>of the discussions that have taken place over the years.

I'd be curious if you could elaborate on the problems you see with
mining the Cohousing-L archives.  The search tool has it's idiosycracies
but otherwise works pretty well, IMHO. (see the "tip" link on any
results page).  Of course it is limited by being (by default) a full text
search.  One problem with a full text search of 20+ years of
archives is the volume of hits.   As has been pointed out, it appears
that "developer" is the term most used on the list for what you are
interested in. A simple search for
develop*
(which catches develop , developer, development ) gets 8000+ hits.
Reviewing the subject lines of some of those hits suggested searching for
+subject:Development vs
which yielded just 53 hits.  I suggest looking at them closer.

This illustrates why I periodically urge people to carefully assign
meaningful subject lines to posts.

You may want to identify threads and then access them from the chronological
indexes (assuming that thread replies occured over a fewdays/weeks).
Note that there is a problem getting to date index page from a message
- see the Date index page (link to it at top of the Info page, the
"Cohousing-L Mailing List" link in the upper left of archive pages goes
to the Info page)

We may be getting updated listsev software including archives
so this may improve this:
http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohousing-l/msg38705.html

But the archives nature of being basically a big collection of text
will not change.

I recently posted a message
 Cohousing mortgage rejection [was: still happening...]
http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohousing-l/msg38699.html
which gave a more meaningful subject line pointing to the
meaningless one.

Ruth Hirsch posted a similar message about the same time:
 Re: Financing/Banks was: Still happening
http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohousing-l/msg38706.html

My message called for someone to post a summary of the long
thread but no one took up the challenge yet that I have noticed.
If we had summary posts (with a unique tag?) on the best threads
the archives could be easier to "mine".

Fred


Fred

--
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
     Email:        fholson at cohousing.org      612-588-9532
My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org         My org:
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