make ET mailing lists searchable

Issue #2161 open
Roland Haas created an issue

Right now there is no explicit search field for the Einstein Toolkit mailing lists. Google apparently indexes them.

At the ET meeting at GeorgiaTech in 2018 it was suggested that a FAQ as well as the ability to search the mailing list would be useful.

Such a functionality should be added to the ET wiki and ET website respectively.

Something like this:

<form action="https://www.google.com/search" class="searchform" method="get" name="searchform" target="_blank">
<input name="sitesearch" type="hidden" value="example.com">
<input autocomplete="on" class="form-control search" name="q" placeholder="Search in example.com" required="required"  type="text">
<button class="button" type="submit">Search</button>
</form>

seems to work and one can limit to particular lists by setting site to something like site:lists.einsteintoolkit.org/pipermail/users

Keyword: None

Comments (5)

  1. Steven R. Brandt
    • removed comment

    Yes, this is reasonable. Maybe clarify that the search is for the mailing list.

    Would it make sense to also have the ability to search the website?

  2. Roland Haas reporter
    • removed comment

    That sounds like a goo idea, yes. That would help finding information since we (unfortunately) do not have a site index of similar where one could see all available pages. Would you be ok if I added the search box to the top level menu bar (not sure how well that works with the mobile view of the pages though).

  3. Roland Haas reporter
    • removed comment

    There's a search entry field in the navbar in branch rhaas/navsearch but I do not know how to arrange things such that the text in the search field is aligned with the baseline of the text outside.

  4. Roland Haas reporter
    • removed comment

    While the current search box works, there is a bit a of a lag since one has to wait for Google to index the website. The newest entries Google finds seem to be from 2018.

    "Proper" ways of providing a searchable archive are discussed here https://wiki.list.org/DOC/How%20do%20I%20make%20the%20archives%20searchable which recommends the same service that the mailman mailing list itself uses: https://www.mail-archive.com/ which in turn requires that one signs up archive@mail-archive.com to the list to be archived. Old emails can be imported by contacting the admins and providing mbox file(s) or links to the existing archive (https://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#import our archive is http://lists.einsteintoolkit.org/pipermail/users/).

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