Concerning the discussion so far, here's the impression I'm getting:

1. Such a site cannot include direct links to resources on
    other peoples sites, including the newsgroups.  That's
    fine.

2. Beware of copyrights.  I planned on giving credit to
    everyone anyhow, but evidently I will need permission
    before including anything just to be on the safe side.
   As long as I do that, I don't see any problems.

3. The newsgroups add up to over 100 megs of data,
    and since all that info will have to be duplicated at
    the site it's going to be large and time-consuming.

Ken Tyler mentioned that he was going to check with admin to see if they are
okay with all of this.  Assuming that they are, then I will have to find out
just how large an amount of data we are actually talking about.  As far as
hosting the site, that may not be as monstrous a problem as we think (I work
for an ISP, and I can probably get some sort of deal).  One thing I'm
curious about though:  how far back do these newsgroups go?  Are all of the
past postings here for viewing, or are they archived somewhere?    Once I
find out exactly how much data the newsgroups amount to, and if POV admin is
okay with this, then I will talk to my ISP and see what kind of a deal they
are willing to make me.

-Doug

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DougE wrote:

> 2. Beware of copyrights.  I planned on giving credit to
>     everyone anyhow, but evidently I will need permission
>     before including anything just to be on the safe side.
>    As long as I do that, I don't see any problems.

I personally see this as the safest course of action. People
don't mind sharing but they do like to know how their work
is being distributed.
 
> 3. The newsgroups add up to over 100 megs of data,
>     and since all that info will have to be duplicated at
>     the site it's going to be large and time-consuming.

My guess would be over 100 megs and this is the text only messages.
The server currently is allocated around 700 megs and is well over
half full now. I see the real problem here as one of content. While
there are many messages with valuable content there is also quite
a bit-o-junk too. It would be a monumental task sifting through the
individual messages trying to find those that someone might find
useful and those that would serve no purpose being repeated.
 Personally I would attack this from a different angle. Instead of
trying to mirror the contents of this news server at a private web
site I would suggest you comb through the scene-files and utilities
groups and suck out the resource related content (with permission
of the original poster of course). There are quite few resources
that those who don't frequent these news groups are missing.
Doing this would in all likelihood cause no problems with the
news admin what so ever.
 
> Ken Tyler mentioned that he was going to check with admin to see if they are
> okay with all of this.

In process. No definitive answer as of yet.

>  Assuming that they are, then I will have to find out
> just how large an amount of data we are actually talking about.

See above.

-- 
Ken Tyler - 1400+ POV-Ray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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On Thu, 18 May 2000 17:58:03 -0700, Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:

>My guess would be over 100 megs and this is the text only messages.
>The server currently is allocated around 700 megs and is well over
>half full now. 

Make it a little over 250 MB of raw text data, attachments excluded.
Throw them it, too, and you end up with more than 650 MB (I know,
because they don't fit on a CD anymore :(  )


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] usanet
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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How 'bout a server-side search? (j/k)
Of course you'd wanna be running Unix or Linux if you were gonna... (take that
Ken, I'm being l'enfant provocateur ;) )

Ken wrote:

> My guess would be over 100 megs and this is the text only messages.
> The server currently is allocated around 700 megs and is well over
> half full now. I see the real problem here as one of content. While
> there are many messages with valuable content there is also quite
> a bit-o-junk too. It would be a monumental task sifting through the
> individual messages trying to find those that someone might find
> useful and those that would serve no purpose being repeated.
>  Personally I would attack this from a different angle. Instead of
> trying to mirror the contents of this news server at a private web
> site I would suggest you comb through the scene-files and utilities
> groups and suck out the resource related content (with permission
> of the original poster of course). There are quite few resources
> that those who don't frequent these news groups are missing.
> Doing this would in all likelihood cause no problems with the
> news admin what so ever.

--
David Fontaine     <dav### [at] faricynet>     ICQ 55354965
Please visit my website: http://www.faricy.net/~davidf/

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On Fri, 19 May 2000 09:32:00 +0300, Peter Popov wrote:
>On Thu, 18 May 2000 17:58:03 -0700, Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:
>
>>My guess would be over 100 megs and this is the text only messages.
>>The server currently is allocated around 700 megs and is well over
>>half full now. 
>
>Make it a little over 250 MB of raw text data, attachments excluded.
>Throw them it, too, and you end up with more than 650 MB (I know,
>because they don't fit on a CD anymore :(  )

I have a script that grabs all new posts off the server each night
and puts them into directories by group.  It then goes into the
povray.binaries.images archive and decodes any new messages with binary
attachments.

The current size of my "decoded images" directory is 237204 kilobytes.
The text archive, including the encoded versions of all those images,
is 742640K.  If you exclude povray.binaries.images (which you shouldn't,
because there are also some very good text posts in there) the size is
317512K.  Excluding the entire .binaries heirarchy gives a size of
127481K, of which 48468K is povray.general and 12483K is povray.off-topic.

My mostly-complete archive of this news server is currently using almost 
a gigabyte of disk space, if you include the decoded images.

-- 
Ron Parker   http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html
These are my opinions.  I do NOT speak for the POV-Team.

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Ron Parker wrote in message ...
>My mostly-complete archive of this news server is currently using almost
>a gigabyte of disk space, if you include the decoded images.

Do you suppose it would be possible to set up a read-only archive server for
the more active groups, containing posts that are more than a year old?

Mark

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On Thu, 18 May 2000 20:09:02 -0400, "DougE" <dou### [at] nlsnet> wrote:

>3. The newsgroups add up to over 100 megs of data,
>    and since all that info will have to be duplicated at
>    the site it's going to be large and time-consuming.

Why on earth are you wanting to duplicate the contents of this news
server anyway? Isn't providing links on your site, to *this* server
adequate? What would the POV community gain from such a situation?

Later,
Glen Berry

( Remove the "7" from 7no### [at] ezwvcom to email me. )

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Glen,

The reason I want to create this site is so that people
who have questions can use a search function to find answers.  I DO NOT
intend to mirror the site, only to compile the best question/asnwer material
from around the net and the newsgroups and provide a search function to
access it.
For example, let's say you want to know why your code for displaying a disc
isn't working right.  You log onto the site, do a search on the keyword
'disc' and up comes all the relevant data.  That seems a lot easier than
searching through several hundred sites, and many thousands of postings on
the newsgroups, wouldn't you agree?

"Glen Berry" <7no### [at] ezwvcom> wrote in message
news:wicqOb2o0dIetaRLn6E01w9Nw4iC@4ax.com...
> On Thu, 18 May 2000 20:09:02 -0400, "DougE" <dou### [at] nlsnet> wrote:
>
> >3. The newsgroups add up to over 100 megs of data,
> >    and since all that info will have to be duplicated at
> >    the site it's going to be large and time-consuming.
>
> Why on earth are you wanting to duplicate the contents of this news
> server anyway? Isn't providing links on your site, to *this* server
> adequate? What would the POV community gain from such a situation?
>
> Later,
> Glen Berry
>
> ( Remove the "7" from 7no### [at] ezwvcom to email me. )

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