P-list archive 2.0

[Monte Davis]

I've exchanged some email lately with John Krafft and with Murthy
Yenamandra and "Oliver Xymoron" (just guessing here: not his real name).
M&O were progenitors of the list, the listserv (which was vanilla software
by 1992) and of the message archive: "I custom-wrote all the archive
software ages ago and haven't touched it since the previous century," says
Oliver.

M&O did us a all a great free service. I think that threading through all
the repetition, chitchat, flame wars and trollery of 24 years at
https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l, there's as much Good Stuff
about Pynchon --readings, commentarty, sources, links -- as in Pynchon
Notes or in the 20 top critical books on TRP.

But damn, it's a bitch to find -- or, having found a given post, to follow
the exchanges dscended from it through whimsical header changes and
"Re:Re(2):Re: GRGR7 - Pointsman's Toilet (was: Vidal's Plastic (was: Ford
F150 Transmission Tips))". Because it's text-based, it clogged with HTML
tags as we made the transition to web mail apps and inline links... and
then there are the 30KB tails of quotebacks on a two-line post. It's no
secret -- or surprise --   that many new list subscribers take one look and
never wrestle with it again.

So: picture the archive migrated to Drupal or another modern textbase/CMS
platform

With full Boolean options (search for "rocket and (not-banana"), "find this
verbatim string," adjacency searching (find "pyramid" and "god" only if
within x words of each other), etc

With a 2D branching-tree display mode so you could see posts' ReplyTo
relationships like ancestors in a family tree, expanding and collapsing
branches as you choose which "child" discussion thread to follow

With the ability to save, edit and reuse complex searches, and to save as a
link a particular branched path of multiple messages...

And make it all faster and prettier and HTML/web-oriented from the ground
up, so it could at some future date work closely with, e.g., Tim Ware's
Pynchon wikis

This would all be volunteer, of course, using either freeware or a
donated/university site license for commercial software. It would need some
actual developer hours -- also donated. And no matter how good the code
that "cleans up" the existing metadata for export to the new framework,
there will always be godknowshowmany posts that break the automatic parsing
-- i.,e. need human eyeball preview beforehand or review and manual
re-tagging afterward.

But none of it happens without a consensus on what capabilities we would
like. I have feeelers out to some knowledgeable people about what
capabilities are no-brainers, and what are unrealistic for a no-budget
crowdsourced project. If you know this stuff, dive in.

And even if you don't, please speak up about what you'd like the archive to
be.
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