From: Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Call 4 a FAQulty
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 11:33:18 

On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, William H. Ansley wrote:

> I am not sure about the "less work" part; the archives are easily
> searchable as plain text (I have downloaded all of them except the most
> recent to my computer in this form) but because of inconsistencies in
> references (different abbreviations, referring to a character by a nickname
> or by a humorously altered form of the name, simple typos, etc.) as well as
> the shear bulk of the material over several different files, it is
> difficult to find specific information.

Still, I think it would be a big improvement if either:

1.  Someone with programing knowledge would help attach a search engine to
the archives (I have no idea how big a job that would be), or 

2.  Each archive were available as a single large text file one could
search online with one's browser.

When I mentioned option #2 to Ranjit, it sounded like limited server space
at his site was the main obstacle.

As it is, I am regularly unable to find conversations in the archives when
I go back to try to find something someone wrote, largely because it takes
so long to search each of the archive volumes individually. 

-Rostrum


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