Any Elfling news?

Any Elfling news?

By Harri Perälä on Sun, 04/26/2020 - 17:32
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General discussion

Does anyone know if there are any plans to restart Elfling, or to make the archives available online in a searchable and browsable form?

In case someone has missed it, the context is that Yahoo Groups has been effectively shut down, and the forum at elfling.midgardsmal.com (2014–2017) is also gone. The mirror at tolklang.quettar.org contains messages up to August 2012, but the search is currently not working. It has been announced that Lambengolmor will be reestablished in some form, but I have not heard anything about Elfling.

By the way, I made a website for my own use that provides rudimentary search functionality for copies of the archives of TolkLang, Elfling and Lambengolmor. It is currently available online. It has not been authorized by anyone, so if you see legal, moral or other problems with it, feel free to let me know.

Submitted by Paul Strack Mon, 04/27/2020 - 05:11

The search is very nice. I can’t think of any ethical reasons against having it be available. There was public search on all the content before the Yahoo lists evaporated.

There was a rumor that Carl Hostetter was thinking of putting up a forum at elvish.org, but I don’t think anything has happened. Most of my own activity is either here or in the Discord server set up by Elaran (link in the sidebar).

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Submitted by Atwe Mon, 04/27/2020 - 11:24

I am not aware of any activities around the groups. AFAIK Helge is only active on Facebook (if at all), which I don't use, but I suppose you could try contact him there.

 

I join Paul and Lokyt in thanking you for the new search site - it will be a fantastic resource - so much that with your permission I'm adding the link to it to the sidebar here.

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Submitted by Lokyt Mon, 04/27/2020 - 12:03

@ Harri Perälä
BTW haven't you considered adding a clickable list of the messages to the page? Some of the posts contain references ("see message 26.10" and such), but there is no simple way to find the messages that are being refered to.

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Submitted by Harri Perälä Tue, 04/28/2020 - 05:31

Thank you all for the responses.

Lokyt, I would certainly like to add the possibility to browse messages by list and month (or something similar). I am not sure when I might get around to doing it, though.

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Submitted by Harri Perälä Sat, 05/02/2020 - 17:06

Sorry about the delay in replying. There are about 40,000 messages that are stored as documents in a NoSQL database.

The code is not published or anything, but if you would like to add some missing features yourself, I'm sure that can be arranged.

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Submitted by Lokyt Sat, 05/02/2020 - 23:46

No problem, we're all doing it just for fun :)

40 000 is indeed a lot. Way more than I thought, actually.
And although a simple list of messages (number + date + link, for example) could be, as I believe, made in a matter of days (meaning: I could offer doing it myself), I suppose such a huge clumsy list isn't exactly what you're planning to have on your site..?
A preferable solution would indeed be a search engine over such a list. And that is, unfortunately, beyond my recent skills.

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Submitted by mach Mon, 05/18/2020 - 22:08

@Harri: That is really a great service – thank you so much for it! Is there any chance Elfscript and Elfscript2 could be added as well (minus all the spam on Elfscript after it got orphaned, of course)? I could send you the archives, if you do not have them.

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Submitted by Harri Perälä Fri, 05/22/2020 - 20:56

That is a good idea. An option to select the lists to search should perhaps then be added, so it would be easy to focus either on language or script discussions.

It seems that I have downloaded the Elfscript archive but not Elfscript2. If you can send that (harri.perala@iki.fi), it would be great. I will add this to the list of things that will, hopefully, one day, get done.

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