On 2/14/23 02:18, Chris Cason wrote:
> As far as I can tell the issue is Google isn't indexing *all* of our 
> pages, regardless of what I do (for example I tried using sitemaps in 
> various forms and it still didn't fetch all the URL's in the sitemap). I 
> ran out of time trying to sort this and just left it alone, hoping 
> google would catch up eventually.

Hi Chris,

To chime in with a related topic; Many of us were using Thunderbird's 
search facilities of the newsgroups over the formally less reliable web 
based search / google search.

As, I think, you are aware, after the recovery from the crash the news 
server is maintaining much less of the overall posting history. It's 
often impossible to get to any older posts these days via Thunderbird.

I remember you saying the POV-Ray news server had been somewhat mangled 
in the past to keep posts in most, but not all forums, for a very long 
time. Something much longer the usual 12 months or so. My 'guess' is 
that when the news server was restored most, if not all, news server 
forums are now dropping posts after a much shorter time (12 months?).

Whether this worth fixing or not I'm unsure. Expect these days the 
newsgroup interface not the primary one for most users. Having a 
reliable way to search the forums should be primary the goal.

Aside: As I find time I've been manually downloading my own posts via 
the web interface - and some posts of others - to plain directories of 
per topic text for the thread and useful attachments. I can then use 
linux commands as mentioned by Bill W to find my forum 'notes.' I've 
been burning time since the crash doing this and I'm nowhere near 
complete. I wish these days I'd not relied so much on the newsgroups as 
a place to record stuff! :-)

Bill P.

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