Transferring Past Log Archives Don Wiss, 5/5/98 Before putting up log files for periods when the list was not running, one has to ask the systems administrator to put place markers up for the past months (or weeks if they are very large). Then you can put the log files up, as you would put any other file. If not from a Listserv you have a big editing job ahead to put them into Listserv format. You cannot use Windows 3.1. It is a 16-bit operating system and can't send a file bigger than 64K. You must upgrade to Windows 95, Windows NT, or use OS/2, or a Mac. Also your e-mail software must be 32-bit. I used Forte's Agent to edit and send my archives. It works very nicely on large files. I had to set the posting width to 105 so Agent wouldn't wrap the long lines. Many editors, e.g. Eudora will want to wrap long lines. Some people have posted things with longer lines. They are okay if left as is, as there will be enough width in the web browser so they don't wrap. In (Free) Agent I open a New Email Message. Then with the cursor in the body use the File | Insert Text File command. Another person used a freeware text editor called PFE (Programmer's File Editor) v 7.001 32 bit. You can write little editing macros. It is available from the author's home page: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/ And another used Word and saved as a text file. The delimiter between articles is 73 equal signs, then only a single carriage return before starting the headers of the next article. Also the order of the Date:, From:, and Subject: is important. They must be in the order I just listed. Any other header fields are optional and can be deleted. The number of spaces after the words Date, From, and Subject is not critical. One tags a good delimiter line then stores it in the buffer with Ctrl-C, then running your cursor along the left tag all the lines, any bottom banners and the space between posts, and Ctrl-V will delete and paste in the delimiter line in one step. Other things that can be done when editing the archives is (1) remove excessive quoting of prior articles and large signatures; (2) remove spam, unsubscribe requests, administration notices, and things clearly off topic; (3) when the archival web page sorts the subjects it puts all starting with a capital letter before all starting with a lower case letter, so one can capitalize the uncapped first letters; (4) ones with a subject of Re: Digest... can be given real subjects; and (5) if one wants to search by author you may need to add names where only addresses appear in the From fields. You would put up each log with this is the first line: PUT LOGyymm PW=xxxxxxx The second line would then have the 73 equal signs. (And no equal signs after the last message.) Any existing log file is wiped out. Be very careful that you have the year and month correct if you copy the line. It is a very easy mistake to put up the file into the wrong month. Apparently an index is not immediately rebuilt. What you have to do is send in a header, and the database will be reindexed. (It may also be reindexed at other times, like when the machine is booted.) Adding material in the past will reassign all index numbers in later articles, as they are just sequentially numbered. The number of hours spent editing archives to put in Listserv format can really add up, but you will be pleased with the results, but you won't want to do it again. I have not checked it out, but here is a perl script to migrate Listproc 6.0c format archive files to Listserv archives (For help with this file, contact: naleks@library.ummed.edu): ftp://ftp.lsoft.com/CONTRIB/notebook-conv.pl It reformats archives from what is basically Unix mailbox format into LISTSERV minimal archives. With minor adjustments, it could reformat most anything you have. Someone used it to convert 15MB of Majordomo archives to LISTSERV. Worked like a charm. He even fiddled with it a bit to eliminate blank lines at the end of any message. L-Soft does not guarantee or warrant that this script will be useful and does not support it. It's a "use at your own risk" thing. Please read ftp://ftp.lsoft.com/contrib/00-index.txt before downloading. Mark Hunnibell has written a script file to convert AOL forum files to LOG files.