On 3/14/2025 12:39 PM, Stewart Baldwin wrote:
It appears that Google Groups still has a lot more early s.g.m
messages than I realized. Searching for "soc.genealogy.medieval" on
Google takes you to the Google Groups website with a clear message
that you can't post new stuff, but a large number of early postings
can be found by searching by date only, with many going back to
January 1996, and a handful from 1995. If I recall correctly, the
group was formed in June of 1996.
Two things here:
That handful of posts from late 1995 and early 1996, before the group actually started, come from people who didn't set their computer date correctly, and so their software attached the wrong date to the header
of their outgoing posts. This was before Windows synchronized computer clock/calendar dates automatically, and before recipient computers
started installing date filters to block backdated messages.
The ones from the earliest years of the group, '96 and '97 (and I don't remember how much longer), aren't representative of the early activity.
Right before Google bought the Deja News archive, the latter lost the
early years of s.g.m. This was not discovered until after the handover
and then it was too late to try to recover them. When I looked into it
years later, almost the entirety of the posts on Google Groups from the
early years were those that had been cross-posted between s.g.m and
another group, typically soc.history.medieval, and it was their presence
in those other groups that allowed those posts to be preserved when the
rest of them were lost. They probably don't represent more than 5% of
the total, and likewise, their topics tend to be genealogy-adjacent (or worse), which is what led them to be cross-posted, rather than
containing the focused genealogical discussions from the time. Still, something is better than nothing.
taf
Two things here:
That handful of posts from late 1995 and early 1996, before the group >actually started, come from people who didn't set their computer date >correctly, and so their software attached the wrong date to the header
of their outgoing posts. This was before Windows synchronized computer >clock/calendar dates automatically, and before recipient computers
started installing date filters to block backdated messages.
I wonder if there would be a simple way to just download and save all of
the 51117 postings which are still available at Google Groups. I think
that we have found out the hard way that big corporations can't be
trusted to preserve stuff like this. Perhaps it would be better if a
handful of regulars had it all saved on an external hard drive, updated
from time to time and stored somewhere, just in case the archives
disappeared from everywhere they are available.
For those curious: I have more old archives (depending on myAs I remember, this happened to my messages quite a bit when I was
personal interest, not for all soc.gen. newsgroups, not even for
soc.roots), but I found later that the messages in French were
altered and almost unreadable because the accepted letters were
removed !
On Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:39:11 -0500, Stewart Baldwin
<sbaldw@mindspring.com> wrote in soc.genealogy.medieval:
I wonder if there would be a simple way to just download and save all of
the 51117 postings which are still available at Google Groups. I think
that we have found out the hard way that big corporations can't be
trusted to preserve stuff like this. Perhaps it would be better if a
handful of regulars had it all saved on an external hard drive, updated >>from time to time and stored somewhere, just in case the archives
disappeared from everywhere they are available.
If someone wants a nearly complete archive of the SGM messages,
I may help by providing the messages in raw format.
I use Forte Agent for years and it keeps emails and usenet messages
in the internal format, i.e. with full headers. For some reason,
2004 is missing, but I have the complete archives (except the
spams I erased and some irrelevant messages like happy new year)
since June 1995.
So if someone wants to set up a server to make the files available,
I can provide most of them. I don't want to distribute this to
everybody, only to someone who will make them available to all.
I will zip the files and put them on my server for retrieving.
For those curious, I was in the committee that redefined the
soc.roots forum in 1995. I don't know if my archives are complete
however. I may have deleted some messages by mistake.
Denis
If of any use, I have the daily digests for April 1998 to November 2011. AdrianSo, if some of us supply whatever we have of the older messages, how
On 3/21/2025 7:55 PM, Adrian Channing wrote:
So, if some of us supply whatever we have of the older messages, how
If of any use, I have the daily digests for April 1998 to November 2011.
Adrian
hard would it be to eliminate the duplicates and make a combined file
(or collection of files)?
It appears that Google Groups still has a lot more early s.g.m messages
than I realized. Searching for "soc.genealogy.medieval" on Google takes
you to the Google Groups website with a clear message that you can't
post new stuff, but a large number of early postings can be found by searching by date only, with many going back to January 1996, and a
handful from 1995. If I recall correctly, the group was formed in June
of 1996.
I wonder if there would be a simple way to just download and save all of
the 51117 postings which are still available at Google Groups. I think
that we have found out the hard way that big corporations can't be
trusted to preserve stuff like this. Perhaps it would be better if a
handful of regulars had it all saved on an external hard drive, updated
from time to time and stored somewhere, just in case the archives
disappeared from everywhere they are available.
Stewart Baldwin
On 3/26/2025 4:40 PM, miked wrote:
i thought there was a site called narkive that was doing exactly thatNarchiv does host a Usenet archive, and if you dig into their site
with all the usenet groups including sgm. It has the advantage over
google in that it is still updating, although the user interface to my
mind is rather unhelpful.
deeply enough, you will find a request that anyone with their own
collection of Usenet posts not already on Narchiv submit them for
inclusion. However, there is a problem.
At least some of the archives of this group that people have been
talking about aren't actually for soc.genealogy.medieval. They are
instead archives of its sister gatewayed mailing list GEN-MEDIEVAL,
which contained (mostly) the same content in an email format. Denis and Adrian are talking about Digests elsewhere in this thread - that is a GEN-MEDIEVAL thing, not a soc.gen.med thing. These will have mailing
list headers rather than Usenet headers, and I don't know whether it is possible for a script to convert one to the other, or if instead some of
the information necessary for integration into Narchiv's Usenet archive
is not preserved.
taf
On Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:33:45 +0000, taf wrote:
On 3/26/2025 4:40 PM, miked wrote:
i thought there was a site called narkive that was doing exactly thatNarchiv does host a Usenet archive, and if you dig into their site
with all the usenet groups including sgm. It has the advantage over
google in that it is still updating, although the user interface to my
mind is rather unhelpful.
deeply enough, you will find a request that anyone with their own
collection of Usenet posts not already on Narchiv submit them for
inclusion. However, there is a problem.
At least some of the archives of this group that people have been
talking about aren't actually for soc.genealogy.medieval. They are
instead archives of its sister gatewayed mailing list GEN-MEDIEVAL,
which contained (mostly) the same content in an email format. Denis and
Adrian are talking about Digests elsewhere in this thread - that is a
GEN-MEDIEVAL thing, not a soc.gen.med thing. These will have mailing
list headers rather than Usenet headers, and I don't know whether it is
possible for a script to convert one to the other, or if instead some of
the information necessary for integration into Narchiv's Usenet archive
is not preserved.
taf
yes i found this too, but i've also found this in what i call the google archive. I dunno where narchive copied the messages from, but there are duplicate posts and threads in the google archiv and, overlapping
threads, which seem to be a mix of GEN-MED and sgm. I dunno how this
stuff worked, but when you search the google archive, you often find
this duplication and end up going round in circles.
miKE
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