ggw (06/04/82)
FROM: G. G. Woodbury Subject:Public archive access There is a lot of information living out there in netland that would be nice to have archived in a public (UNIX) access location that could be gotten automatically. I would like to propose a method for such access. The basic method would be automatic answering of fixed-format messages to a special mail recipient on specified machines. For example: To: npois!harpo!whoever!request Subject: get archive Request: item-id This message for instance, would retrieve the item given by item-id and return it to the originator. The subject field contents is the specification of the action desired, in this example to get an item from an archive. The item-id field could specify the archive (if there is more than one on a specific machine). Any machine could set up an archive on any given topic and then publish (via netnews - of course) the contents, or there could be a <get toc> command available. The syntax of the commands would be very simple, and rigidly enforced. Any bad requests received could be bounced back with a simple comment about syntax. To extend to concept of automatic mail requesting, an opinion polling recipient could be implemented with ease. That is if someone can provide a nice set of routines that could read mail and handle request parsing. Does anybody have such things already? Am I months behind? Am I years ahead? Comments? Gregory G. Woodbury BTL PY 2K-332 x7287 (...!npois!eiss!ggw)
rick (06/07/82)
I like the idea a lot! I have often wished for a copy of a long dead news item. Even better would be a service for searching the archives for all items that reference a certain boolean combination of keywords, or even more sophisticated. The service shouldn't be too expensive to run if requests were batched together, so there only needed to be one pass over the archives per day/week/month (depending on volume or requests).