The Mailing List Archives

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The Mailing List Archives

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All messages sent to the Hollywood mailing list between January 2006 and August 2012 have now been imported into a special, read-only section in the Hollywood forums. The Hollywood mailing list was started by Lázi in 2006 and thus is 4 years older than the Hollywood forum which was set up in 2010.

Over 2000 messages were posted to the Hollywood mailing list between 2006 and 2012 so I think this is a valuable pool of knowledge about Hollywood programming that should be publicly available in an easily accessible way. On Yahoo! Groups it's not really possible to access all those messages that have been posted to the mailing list so I was thinking about alternatives..

Technically, importing these messages into phpBB was - of course! - done by a Hollywood script. That script converted all messages from their original format into a meta format which could then be used to import the messages into phpBB using a tiny php helper script.

In the end the Hollywood script used to convert the messages into the meta format for the php importer became more complex than I had anticipated because it had to

- format code and quote sections properly
- remove all e-mail addresses
- remove all last names to protect people's privacy
- remove advertising placed in mails by Yahoo!
- handle different charsets
- handle multipart/html messages
- cut signatures
- match mail senders to existing forum user accounts where possible
- re-layout the text without hard-coded line breaks for the best appearance on all devices

Nevertheless, now it's done, and 2340 messages have been imported into the Hollywood forums and are now easily accessible for everyone here:

viewforum.php?f=33

So don't be surprised if the post count of some people has dramatically increased over the last 24 hours... that's just because my Hollywood script tried to match messages from the mailing list to forum user accounts :)
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