OldTools Message Archive -- Site Notes

Site Notes

The Software

The software you are using is a combination of the apache web server, the MySQL database server, and a set of PHP scripts that I wrote. Tad Truex wrote the code that highlights HTML links, and many Galoots have offered comments and suggestions to make the archive better. Thanks to all! This software is installed on servers running the Debian distribution of Linux, with a fairly recent 2.4 kernel. procmail is used to pipe all incoming OldTools messages to a Perl script that processes the mail and inserts it into the database. Development was done entirely using the vim editor. I tested the pages with recent builds of Mozilla, 4.x versions of Netscape and lynx.

All of the scripts and configuration files that drive the archive are freely available, and licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. I like this software license because it guarantees that anything derived from the software I wrote will remain open. If you would like to try mirroring the archive at your site, want to stuff the data into your own database server, or just want to see how it works, I've packaged everything up with a README file to get you started. Send me email and I'll explain how to get it.

Mirrors

The archive currently has three mirrors. If you have the software listed above (note that MySQL and PHP also work on a Windows server, running apache or IIS) and are interested in hosting a mirror, please contact me.

Copyright

As noted in my Copyright statement, the Copyright on messages displayed in the archive is retained by the poster of the message. If a former OldTools member wishes to have his or her pre-archive content removed from this site, please contact me at cswingle@gmail.com and I will remove these messages. The archive operates with the blessing of the ListMoms, and it should be understood that postings to the list are archived and will be available on the Internet. The site itself retains my Copyright.

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped along the way. I'd like to give special thanks to Russ Allen who has provided me with a lot of the early messages in the archive, and who helped immeasurably in getting the bios from his page integrated with the archive. Paul Comino, BugBear, and Josh Clark all provided large chunks of the archive from their own files. BugBear's comments on the user interface have really helped make the archive as useful as it is. Finally, Tad Truex has been hosting the only non-Alaska mirror, and he contributed some code to turn HTML links into real, clickable links in the archive.

Many thanks to everyone who has provided comments on the archive!

Privacy

To the best of my ability, I will follow these policies regarding the privacy of the users of this archive:

Cookies, or any other form of remote (your computer, not mine) storage will not be used.

The web server stores the following pieces of information for every web site connection:

IP address of the computer making the connection.
Date and time of the connection.
The HTTP request (basically the URL that appears in the Location: bar of your browser).
The web site address you were previously at.
The information your web browser sends about itself (typically the browser name, version, and operating system you are using).

I consider this information to be private. I will not provide this information in raw form to anyone, and will only use the data to examine how the OldTools archive is being used. For example, I may compile statistics on which web browsers and operating systems people are using. But I won't release any information from this data that could be used to identify or track anyone.

For the majority of searches, the actual search terms you enter into the forms are not logged by the web server. There are a few exceptions, most notably when you click the links at the bottom of the results pages that allow you to view the next (or previous) set of results. In the cases where search terms appear in the server logs, I will not release this information.

The script that adds messages to the database attempts to obscure email addresses by replacing all of the domain but the first letter with three dots (bbonds@sfgiants.com is replaced with bbonds@s...). If you find an email address somewhere in the archives, please let me know and I'll obscure it. This is inconvenient if you want to contact someone on the list, but it prevents people from sending all of us unsolicited email.

I'll do everything I can to keep the content of your message as it was originally sent to the list. Mail messages that are plain text, with less than 80 characters per line should look identical to those posted to the list. Messages containing any sort of attachment, or with lines longer than 79 characters, or messages which depend on a web-based email client to display them properly may not be formatted the same way. Also note that Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express can be (mis)-configured to send messages using encoding CP-1252, even though the message headers claim to be using encoding ISO-8859-1. I have a procmail recipe that attempts to repair the broken message, but it may not work perfectly.

I do not restrict access to the site, which includes web crawlers looking for pages to archive and index. This means that it is possible for anyone to read the archive, download it, or even print it out and publish the content on their own. It also means that archived messages may appear as search results in certain search engines.

I try to stay as close to the straight HTML 4.0 standard as I can. These pages have been tested with lynx, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape 4.x and up, and Internet Explorer 4 and up. If you experience a problem with these pages and your particular web browser, please let me know.

The only person responsible for the content of each message in this archive is the person who sent the message. It is your responsibility to evaluate the information in each message. Read and apply this information at your own peril.

In my experience, the content of the list is remarkably free from the sorts of things that one might find offensive or inappropriate for a younger audience. However, if you are concerned about your children reading this list, or the possibility that they may see something you would prefer they don't see, it is up to you to control your child's access. The only content I will edit in this archive is content that violates Federal or State law, which is contrary to University of Alaska policy, or which the ListMoms and I agree has no place in the archive.

I do not consider the OldTools list content (the messages themselves) to be private in any way. Except under special circumstances, if you say it on the list, it's going into the archive for all to see.

If you have any questions or comments about the archive or these policies, please feel free to contact me. This archive operates with the blessing of the Listmoms, and I'd like to keep it that way, so if you have concerns, let's talk about it.

Click on one of the links below to get down to business!