Why do the URLs of posts here change?

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/9/2015 7:04 AM, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>> Posts on this newsgroup/mailing list are archived on the web, but the URLs
>> seem to change, which leaves dead links if you search for things.
>
> Steven,
>
> It's a known issue, but one which appears to be somewhat unavoidable,
> at least in Mailman 2.x. The problem is that every now and then,
> postmaster at python.org gets a legitimate request from someone for a
> message to be deleted from the list archive. The way this is done, is
> that the message is removed from the underlying mbox file,

The post could be replaced by a placeholder "This message deleted'

  and the
> archive regenerated. That changes the counter for every message after

A placeholder should avoid that.

> that point - or maybe every message in the generated archive. (I have
> no idea why the numerical basename of your subject message would have
> changed so much. Maybe there is just a single ever incrementing
> counter for a given Mailman installation.)

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy