[mmgsoc] Pipermail archive UI

[Terri Oda]

> >If any of you think that arranging conversations by months offers 
> advantage
> >in any form, then I can do so. But in that case, the whole 
> conversation will
> >be kept in the month when its first message arrives.
>
> I think the key thing here is that regardless of how the messages are 
> stored
> on disk, it should be possible to follow conversations across 
> organizational
> boundaries, like months.
We talked about this some with the systers team last year, and most of 
the cases we came up with were along the lines of "I'm looking for this 
thread from last month..." (which could probably be solved better by 
search, esp. search that includes the dates so you still have a way to 
get a month's data shown)   Less clear is when someone's goal is more 
like "I was on vacation and want to catch up on the mailing list" -- 
monthly views might be more useful for that.  Our consensus was that 
taking away the monthly view would likely be safe if we paired this 
change with the ability to search by date.  Of course, once you can 
search by date easily, you could just generate monthly archives as saved 
searches.

It might be helpful for you to be able to see our survey results from 
last year regarding how people actually use the archives.  I've shared a 
copy with you via google docs.  I don't think the participants would 
appreciate having their survey results public, but they're obviously 
interested in having mailman developers know how they use things, so if 
anyone else here wants access let me know.

 Terri