Synth-diy-test

Hi all,

When Yahoo shut down their groups section, I started a project to archive some groups and put them on the synth-diy.org <http://synth-diy.org/> site. Florian was extremely helpful in creating the scripts to create web pages from the archived messages.

In response I also received lots of archives from various other persons (thanks!), but they were often in an incompatible format. It would be quite a task to create importers for each of the 4-5 different formats that I received.

I’m using github copilot and openai’s Codex for other things, so a couple of days ago I thought, why not have a go at it with some LLM’s.  It turns out they are great at analysing the various formats. And creating the web app was no problem either, of course. The architecture is now quite different. Instead of running a converter on each archive like before, I just plonk the archive’s raw data on the webserver,  run a python script to update the database (including full text search), and I’m done. It also now includes all other archive data like files, photos, polls, etc.

You can see the results on https://synth-diy.org/yg-archives2/. If it doesn’t show any groups, I’m probably rebuilding the database. It’s still in flux. Just try again later.

Please let me know what you think. Any suggestions are welcome of course.

I still have more archives to put on there, but I don’t have enough disk space left. I’m going to tackle that soon.

Ben