BusinessObjects Board

Who is Listserv Archives and why does he have so many posts?

:?: What are the AOL Listserv Archives?
:idea: AOL hosted a listserve for Business Objects (BUSOB-L) until August 2002. Amy Miller and Susan Quant (from the University of Pennsylvania) were the owners and administrators of the list. The AOL Listserv Archive Posts are a list of archives from the listserve covering the period 1998 through August 2002.

One of the driving forces for the creation of Bob was that it was imperative that we have a history of issues and solutions available. At least three years worth of BUSOB-L archives will be available via BOB and we intend to preserve product related questions and answers indefinitely.

:?: How did they get here?
:idea: Ken Gaul provided a script to load the archives. This script converted the archives into Bob posts in appropriate Forum Topics. The posts were then reviewed for by a group of Bob volunteers for consistency. Minor corrections may have been made that would not affect content of the posts.

Here is an overview of the process that was used to convert the archives to Bob posts.

[list] :arrow_forward: To the extent possible, keywords were used to dynamically assign Listserve Archives to an appropriate Forum Topics.
:arrow_forward: Any item with the same subject line is assumed to be from the same topic. That means that, for example, any topic with “No data to fetch” as its subject got lumped together, even if the posts occurred over a four year span.
:arrow_forward: Any item with a different subject is assumed to be a different topic. That means if someone changed a subject, even slightly, it’s a new topic. Or if the archive split the topic onto two lines, it appears to be a new topic.
:arrow_forward: No attempt was made to attribute posts to existing users. Every post from the archive load is attached to the special user “Listserv Archives”.
:arrow_forward: The token [BUSOB-L] was removed from the subject line to make the topic matching more reliable. A subscriber to the list could have selected an option to put [BUSOB-L] on the subject of every email automatically. That token was removed to match subjects. Also the “Regarding” (Re: RE: re:) was removed to try to match replies to the original subject. Forward (FWD fwd all other combos) was removed in a similar fashion. We also tried to recognize some of the foreign language versions, such as AW for RE. There are probably more that we didn’t catch.
:arrow_forward: Time-sensitive posts such as user group meeting announcements were not converted. We didn’t see much use in preserving an announcement for a local user group meeting from two years ago. :)[/list]

:?: I’ve found something wrong with an Archive Post. What should I do?
:idea: We have an enhancement planned for Bob’s software that will allow you to “Report a Post” to a moderator. When that feature is available, simply use it and enter a few comments as to what you think might be wrong. For now, please contact one of the moderators for your forum, and they will look into the issue.

:?: Some of the email address or web links in these posts no longer work!
:idea: Well, actually, that might not be too surprising. People change jobs, new companies start and old companies fade away. Since our archives go back many years, it is entirely possible that links or email addresses are no longer valid. Current Bob members have the ability to manage their signature; any changes made are reflected on every post ever made on Bob. But the archives are static and will not change. Please keep this in mind while using them as a resource.


Bob (BOB member since 2002-06-06)