P-list archive 2.0

[Monte Davis]

What the p-list looks & feels like to me day to day is... gmail. To someone
else, Outlook, or Thunderbird, or...

I'm not talking about any change at all to the listserv front end, or about
replacing email with some "structured" wiki discussion tool, let alone
about <gahhh> policies. Talking ***only*** about making posts in the
archive easier to find (search) and discussions easier to follow (linkage
parsing and display).

e.g. I couldn't care less whether anyone posts in plain text or HTML, but
there is no upside for anyone to the drooling swathes of HTML tags in the
current HTML-unaware archive.

Likewise, if you're reading archived post B and the interface always allows
you to see (say) header and opening words of ancestor post A and descendant
posts C1,C2,C3... and to click readily to full text of any /all of them...
I see no upside to retaining (or at any rate displaying) all the old "On
April 4 John Bailey wrot..." auto-quoteback appends below.

I love the anarchy (except when I hate it (but neither wish nor would try
to change it.)) I'm well aware that most subscribers rarely if ever visit
the archive, and don't plan to proselytize its use should it become the
nifty accessible place I'd like it to be. Such an archive would be much
more useful to Pynchon students and scholars who aren't regular posters...

to new subscribers and lurkers who might like to sample and explore more
broadly than this month's flow...

and to those of us (very possibly a minority, and that's fine) who'd like
there to be something lasting and maybe even cumulative in all this.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 9:19 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> To alter the P-list's structural qualities might necessarily have an
> effect on its implicit politics. The crap search function and the fact
> that most people don't post in plain text is part of the list's
> anarchic qualities, and any reform will impose new hierarchies. The
> possibility of moderation - even by default - could come up, as could
> other forms of censorship. I imagine everyone here would fight against
> that, of course, but the form an online conversation takes definitely
> affects its content. Compare the P-list with Facebook pages, which are
> very limiting in the kind of discourse they allow.
>
> Absolutely not against what you're proposing, though! Just waffling.
>
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 10:53 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > No skills and I want what is most wanted.
> >
> > On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 8:25 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I've got no skills to offer, but I agree that the archives are chock
> full
> >> of riches that do equal, in fragments, any published Pynchon
> scholarship. No
> >> unified theories, but lots of gems.
> >>
> >> The flame wars back then were epic, and I contributed my share in those
> >> wars. Trolls were relentless too. There were factions and
> non-combatants.
> >> Exciting times.
> >>
> >> David Morris
> >>
> >>
> >> On Monday, April 4, 2016, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> 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.
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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