Re: Admin Suggestions: Mallorn wish list

> All the Yahoo iris discussion forums archived at Mallorn (the two I'm
> especially interested in are the species group, and the space age
> group).  I'm not doing much with species at the moment, and dislike
> space age irises, but might like to look up information in the future,
> and would enjoy reading bits and pieces now and then when discussion is
> slow (or not of interest) on iris-talk/photos.  I am not willing to wade
> thru Yahoo's contortions to read them there.

That would be easy enough to do.  I'd need to know the listowners and the
names of the lists to contact them (unless someone wants to do some
evangelizing of their own!)

I can also add in past messages if anyone has any archived copies that they'd
like to send my way.

Depending on the amount of traffic, hosting the lists here could even be
a possibility.

> A pedigree program linked to the online iris register database.  Maybe
> this could happen easily now that Mike Lowe is registrar?  He has
> several pedigrees on his World Iris website <http://www.worldiris.com>,
> and has been the source of the raw data for the online database.  Mike,
> if you are reading this, I am hiding under my desk where you can't hit
> me <g>  I'm sure you will have lots of spare time to devote to such a
> thing....

This, of course, is complicated.  :)  We can talk about it, and I know that
you and I have talked about other possible changes to the irisregister site
to show a plant's lineage, clickable pedigrees, etc.  I think I'd need to
get together with John and other interested parties to figure out exactly
how to go about doing it.  It's obviously not something that I can just 
sit down and program without any input.

> A more dependable search engine/index - maybe that will happen with your
> new system?  By more reliable, I mean that in the past, the link between
> what turns up in a search and the actual message hasn't always worked.
> And the AND/OR type searches haven't always worked.  Sometimes, AND has
> given OR results, sometimes AND has eliminated all results, even when I
> could find examples by rummaging thru the index.

In my opinion, the current list search interface sucks.  :)  The database
is very prone to corruption.  That's partially because we're using an older
version of the indexing sofware -- newer versions went 'commercial' and charge 
licensing fees based on the amount of data that you're searching through.
It's prohibitively expensive to upgrade, so I started working on my own
version.

The newer version is totally SQL-based, so it's much faster.  It should
also return much more reliable results.

> A way to search for posts by author and content separately.  Although it
> is currently possible to search by an author's name AND keywords, the
> author's name often will show up as part of the content (referring to
> something they said or an iris they introduced, or copied from a
> signature line in a previous post).

The other nice thing about the database is that I can create as many fields
as I want to search on.  Right now each header from a message goes into the
database, so it's theoretically possible to only search based on the Subject:,
From:, Date:, etc.  Things will be set up so that you can search based on
any combination of words in the body or any header.

The other nifty thing that I'm doing is sending the messages to a newsgroup.
These aren't publicly available newsgroups; these are only available from the
hort.net server if you have a username and password.  The really neat thing
about the newsgroups is that it automatically displays message threads, etc.
when you're reading it.  If anyone wants to play with the newsreader, let 
me know!

I'm debating whether or not to store the message body in the database because
it would take up a *lot* of room.  Right now the search results actually 
connect to the news server and pull the data from there (mostly in the 
interests of saving disk space).

One other thing...  The search box on the archive page will automatically 
search all of the important headers AND the body.  If you want to only 
search certain headers, etc. you'd have to go to the (currently non-existent)
'Advanced Search' page.  

If you can't quit visualize what I have in mind, check out the search stuff
that I programmed at http://woodyplants.nres.uiuc.edu/ -- the content isn't
the same, but the search concept is split similarly.

Chris

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