14 replies to this topic

[DEBRO]

Hi there,

I don't want to start rumors but does the Stellalist exist anymore? I sent a message today to stella@atari2600.org and it bounced. I certainly hope it isn't dead. Hopefully I just got accidentally dropped. I can sign up again if that is the case.

I wonder how long it's been like this. I don't remember getting a message in the past 1-2 years

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Last message I got is from 17.06.2010.

[batari]

I tried searching the archive a while back and got dead links. Who hosts it?

[DEBRO]

batari, on Thu Mar 31, 2011 12:14 PM, said:

I tried searching the archive a while back and got dead links. Who hosts it?

It's Andrew's domain. I wanted to see if it was just me and if I needed to re-subscribe. I couldn't check at work because the domain is blocked. I was going to check once I got home. I hope this isn't the end

[Nathan Strum]

Could the list be hosted through AtariAge?

[DEBRO]

Nathan Strum, on Thu Mar 31, 2011 1:50 PM, said:

Could the list be hosted through AtariAge?

I believe it was temporarily before switching to Andrew's domain.

[Albert]

The atari2600.org domain was pointing to this server, but Andrew took the domain back over so he could put advertising on this page:

http://www.atari2600.org/dasm

I forgot that the [stella] mailing list was using this domain. I'm going to have to move the mailing list to another domain, such as AtariAge.org. I'm surprised it took anyone this long to report the problem, as it's been this way for months now.

..Al

[Albert]

Well, I just spent two hours getting the [Stella] list transplanted to AtariAge.org. Which didn't actually require me to move any files, but it was a pain in the ass and I'm not done yet. Here's the main list for the page:

http://atariage.org/...listinfo/stella

Here are the archives:

http://atariage.org/pipermail/stella/

Ignore the posts from April 2011, those appeared when I rebuilt the archive (which I had to do to fix links from Atari2600.org to AtariAge.org). As you can see, there have been no posts on Stella since June 2010, nearly a year ago. I'm not sure when exactly the list stopped working, as you can see that there was no activity for May, February and January of 2010 either, so traffic was quite light already.

The list is still non-functional as far as posting goes. Getting that to work is probably going to be the trickiest bit, and as I didn't set the list up initially (work that was done nearly six years ago), I'm going to have to spend some time figuring out how Mailman (the mailing list program) interfaces with mail program on the server. Frankly I'm not sure it's worth the effort, given the amount of time (many months) for anyone to even say anything about the list being down. The archives are at least up, but they are not searchable. It would be damn cool to import them into the forum somehow, which would require writing a script to insert the posts into a "Stella" forum (and the forum has an API for such purposes). I could even match up Stella posters with their accounts on AtariAge when there is an obvious connection. Here's an example post:

[stella]Implementing a moving window that wraps...

Thom Cherryhomes [email removed] 
Sun Apr 8 14:51:32 CDT 2007

I am trying to implement a moving window that wraps.....

say you have 32 bytes in zero page, something like

00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0a 0b 0c 0d 0e 0f 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f

and you display, 22 of them on screen at a given time:

[00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0a 0b 0c 0d 0e 0f 10 11 12 13 14 15] 16
17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f

I'm trying to implement an algorithm that implements this moving
window, BUT it wraps around to the beginning after the end has been
reached:

00 01] 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0a 0b [0c 0d 0e 0f 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f

(as an aside, the values are the low byte of an indirect address to
LDA into PF1 and PF2 respectively....)

what would be the best way to implement this?

-Thom

Wouldn't be difficult to parse these, and even include attachments when they exist.

..Al

[Thomas Jentzsch]

If you can make the archives searchable again that would be great. Importing all posts (with attachements) seems like a good idea to me too (maybe even better). Can you import the thread structure too?

IMO the list is dead and even with all it good memories, its not worth keeping it alive now. But I really hope the history can be fully preserved.

[Albert]

Thomas Jentzsch, on Mon Apr 4, 2011 2:30 PM, said:

If you can make the archives searchable again that would be great.

I don't think it was very easy to add searching capability (which is why it wasn't done in 2005), however, I bet i could add some sort of Google search to the archives that would allow searching of all the archived pages. Since they are all just a big pile of HTML pages, Google can easily index them.

Quote

Importing all posts (with attachements) seems like a good idea to me too (maybe even better). Can you import the thread structure too?

Maintaining the thread structure would be a bit trickier, but should be possible since I assume each "thread" has a unique key that is maintained (otherwise the archiver would not be able to maintain the individual posts linked together by thread). Just makes the script a bit more complex, as you need to maintain a running list of these threads as you're going through them and keep tabs on each new forum topic you're creating. Then, if you run into that thread key again, look it up in your table and if you've already created a forum thread, add a new post to that thread instead of starting another.

Quote

IMO the list is dead and even with all it good memories, its not worth keeping it alive now. But I really hope the history can be fully preserved.

It can definitely be preserved, and adding the posts to the forum here would make them easily searchable. It's just a matter of taking the time to do some research on how the archived posts are stored and writing a script to import them into the forum. And thoroughly testing said script before importing the posts into the live forum!

Edit: I have written scripts to import many thousands of messages into the forum before--before I put edit restrictions in place, several people had gone through and removed literally thousands of their own posts by editing them away. This pissed me off enough that I went through old database backups and restored those posts using an automated tool I wrote.

..Al

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Albert, on Mon Apr 4, 2011 2:44 PM, said:

This pissed me off enough that I went through old database backups and restored those posts using an automated tool I wrote.

You even restored Pitfall Harry's old posts?

[Albert]

Thomas Jentzsch, on Mon Apr 4, 2011 4:17 PM, said:

Albert, on Mon Apr 4, 2011 2:44 PM, said:

This pissed me off enough that I went through old database backups and restored those posts using an automated tool I wrote.

You even restored Pitfall Harry's old posts?

I'm not really sure what happened in the case of Pitfall Harry. When I went through and recovered posts, there were none that he "edited" away, so if they were actually deleted at some point then they are gone forever (well, insofar as I'm not going to spend any time trying to track them down in ancient backups). If they were nuked before I moved the forum from phpBB to Invision, it would be a huge undertaking to retrieve them (although not impossible). I ended up restoring over 10,000 posts from various users, though, and this was in November of 2008. Not long after this I modified the forum software to enforce a "limited" editing window, with the ability to grant users the ability to edit specific posts, as well as the ability for some forums to allow for indefinite editing.

That also was a pain, and I've had to migrate those mods through forum software changes for the last two years (and will need to do it again soon when 3.2 is released in a few months). Fortunately, it's one of the last hard-coded mods in the software, thanks mainly to new features added to the software over the years, as well as the hooks system that allows installation of modifications without code changes. I wrote my first hook recently to sort the list of online users on the forum index:

http://community.inv...alphabetically/

..Al

[batari]

I think it would be great if you could import all of the Stella messages, especially if you can associate the messages with members and keep the threads together (I think just matching the subjects would work - just filter out the RE: and Manuel's AW: ). I'd suggest making it a locked forum so it doesn't get clogged with replies, especially to posts that are 15 years old by now.

[Albert]

batari, on Tue Apr 5, 2011 5:15 PM, said:

I think it would be great if you could import all of the Stella messages, especially if you can associate the messages with members and keep the threads together (I think just matching the subjects would work - just filter out the RE: and Manuel's AW: ). I'd suggest making it a locked forum so it doesn't get clogged with replies, especially to posts that are 15 years old by now.

Yes, I would definitely strip out the "RE:" and "AW:" subject prefixes and it would be a read-only (Archive) forum. If someone wants to start a new thread, they can do so in one of the existing programming forums (quoting whatever they need to).

..Al

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Any news on this?