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Valeria de Paiva (Aug 26 2020 at 22:40):hi all, a quick question. Has anyone told the categories mailing list about this zulip channel?
Nathanael Arkor (Aug 26 2020 at 22:43):There was an email on the 24th of March from Christian Williams (subject: categories: Category Theory Community Server).
Valeria de Paiva (Aug 26 2020 at 22:46):Nathanael Arkor said:
There was an email on the 24th of March from Christian Williams (subject:
categories: Category Theory Community Server).
Many thanks!
John Baez (Aug 27 2020 at 22:07):We might remind them about it sometime... maybe when there's another conference that features discussions held here.
Valeria de Paiva (Aug 27 2020 at 23:50):John Baez said:
We might remind them about it sometime... maybe when there's another conference that features discussions held here.
John, I wanted to tell the categories mailing list about the issue with their archives, because I'm under the impression that most there don't know about it. I certainly did not, I assumed that all was well and everything was backed up somewhere. I just would need to google where, if need be! So I was looking for that discussion we had at the beginning of the year.
David Michael Roberts (Sep 07 2020 at 07:47):@Valeria de Paiva I spoke with Bob R briefly, and he was keen to get his hands on the back issues that are currently in limbo under an nntp protocol.
David Michael Roberts (Sep 07 2020 at 07:48):Here's the discussion that I think you were looking for: https://categorytheory.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/229111-general/topic/Disappearing.20archives
Valeria de Paiva (Sep 07 2020 at 16:20):David Michael Roberts said:
Here's the discussion that I think you were looking for: https://categorytheory.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/229111-general/topic/Disappearing.20archives
Many thanks @David Michael Roberts for answering the implicit question of "where is this discussion"!
also thanks for talking to Bob R.
I re-read the previous thread and realized that @Simon Burton has done the backing up in at least one place, his personal website, I think. Can you confirm?
But we know this is not enough and the main hurdle seems to be what @RobertFurber was discussing in the last message of the old thread:
I think someone who knows how to program in Emacs Lisp could download a full copy, but I think it's illegal by the letter of the law (unless you asked each and every poster individually for their copyright). So it would have to "fall off a lorry/truck".
Does this seem a fair summary?
It seems to me odd that gmane could have it all up online for so many years and it's still officially not allowed?
are the laws different in the EU? Does anyone know a lawyer we could ask these questions?
cos' of course we can try to have tarballs uploaded to libgen, but it then fails the main purpose of being accessible mathematical information, right?
I think the previous thread wound up in nice discussions about distributed systems etc, but the problem at hand has not been solved, except that Simon has a copy of the reader running. I'd appreciate been told that I am being dense and that we now have solved the problem of not losing the last 11 years of discussions in the category mailing list, if this is so. in this case we should tell the members of the category mailing list what's the problem and what's the solution. Failing this, we should at least let them know about the problem!
Simon Burton (Sep 07 2020 at 17:14):The archive I grabbed is from "https://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/#archives" which runs from 1990 to 2009.
Valeria de Paiva (Sep 07 2020 at 17:17):Simon Burton said:
The archive I grabbed is from "https://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/#archives" which runs from 1990 to 2009.
oh, thanks for the info. so the problem is still full-fledged.
Simon Burton (Sep 07 2020 at 17:27):Looking again at this now.... I found a program to download nntp and now it looks like I have all messages from 24 Jan 2009 to 3 sep 2020. It's only 19M compressed, with 10279 messages.
Simon Burton (Sep 07 2020 at 17:29):Here it is: http://arrowtheory.com/mirror/categories.tgz
Valeria de Paiva (Sep 07 2020 at 17:43):Yay!!!!! what great news @Simon Burton ! Many THANKS! only a thousand messages per year? interesting. how many in the other tarball, do you know? do you also know a way of counting links within messages? (I'm assuming these lead to papers or other important stuff)
Simon Burton (Sep 07 2020 at 17:53)::) Good questions.. looks like 1990-2009 has 7948 messages.
Simon Burton (Sep 07 2020 at 17:57):It doesn't seem easy to count links, as there are all kinds of links in every message, such as list archive "permalinks" (which seem to be broken), personal signatures, etc. etc.
Valeria de Paiva (Sep 07 2020 at 19:51):(deleted)
Valeria de Paiva (Sep 07 2020 at 19:56):Simon Burton said:
It doesn't seem easy to count links, as there are all kinds of links in every message, such as list archive "permalinks" (which seem to be broken), personal signatures, etc. etc.
ah, ok, not worth bothering with the links then. but thank you so much!!!
only 20K messages in total, I'm making a new github repo just to keep another copy around!
David Michael Roberts (Sep 07 2020 at 21:19):When we get a reasonably clean copy we need to send it to Bob R
Simon Burton (Sep 08 2020 at 16:36):@Valeria de Paiva Github is a really great idea... Would you like me to set this up? I could potentially maintain it, with regular updates, on an ongoing basis.
Valeria de Paiva (Sep 08 2020 at 16:45):Simon Burton said:
Valeria de Paiva Github is a really great idea... Would you like me to set this up? I could potentially maintain it, with regular updates, on an ongoing basis.
Yes, I would love it!! Please!! I was under the misapprehension before that this was a huge amount of data, but it is not that big and definitely not beyond what GitHub can deal with. I am still worried about the legal issues (especially now with GDPR, one needs to check this out), but thinking simply of sensible laws, people who wrote to the mailing list intended for others to see what they had written, I think.
Simon Burton (Sep 08 2020 at 17:28):Ok, I made a start on this here: https://github.com/punkdit/categories ...
Valeria de Paiva (Sep 09 2020 at 00:27):Simon Burton said:
Ok, I made a start on this here: https://github.com/punkdit/categories ...
Thanks! this is very cool!