[ih] Museum-quality archive for this list?

[touch at strayalpha.com]

Hi, Dave (et al.),

Your friendly neighborhood list originator and admin here.

> On Nov 15, 2021, at 2:34 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> I don't remember whether this has been discussed or resolved here, before, but looking at the depth of historical knowledge that is casually proffered here makes me wish that the list is automatically archived under museum-quality conditions, with easy public access.

It has been several times, notably when we moved it from the unstable resources at ISI (that did not even include off-site backup) to the ISOC.

I have tried many times to find a more archival home for the list, but:

	- we do not monetize info about list posters or content in any way
	- we do not charge to participate in the list

Thus we have no funds to pay for such a service, were one to exist. Note that archive.org <http://archive.org/> does not run mailing lists AND its services require a per-year fee. They don’t say what happens when you stop paying, but in-perpituity escrows aren’t cheap to setup, even with initial funds. HOWEVER, note that such an service has other constraints, notably:
	- honors the “no monetization” conditions above
	- does not limit posts per day or number of subscribers
	- allows full control by the list admin
	- can support a transfer of the current list archives

I’ve contacted many more typical archive-friendly places, including the Computer History Museum, but nobody currently runs a list intended to be archival, so none were able to assist. Such lists hosted at the IEEE ComSoc or ACM SIGCOMM societies have no archive capability either.

The closest such “archive” is that this list, being on the Internet, may be incidentally archived by places like the Internet Wayback machine.

Joe