Back to the main page

Mailing List Logs for

>>>>>[These are the old (as in "ancient") logs for the ShadowRN mailing list and its associated lists KAGE-CAR, NERPS, PLOT-D, ShadowTK, SRCard, and SRFanFic. The lists were very active through the 1990s and into the 2000s, but a variety of factors caused their decline in popularity among the online Shadowrun community — though I won't go into that here and now.

Using the links and/or drop-down above, you can select the list whose logs you want to view, and then browse through the messages. I could have simply dumped the bare files, but I decided to pretty it all up a bit and make it more easily usable by setting up a navigation system that shows the messages by year and month, so it's not quite as overwhelming as giving one huge list would be, and easier to navigate than a bunch of loose files.

Thanks To

In chronological order:

• Robert Hayden, for setting up these lists in the first place.
• Peter Boddy, for trying to track down the ShadowTK logs in March 2015, without which they wouldn't have surfaced.
• Mark Imbriaco, for having kept the log files all these years and digging them up.

Reading the Logs

The messages for each list are sorted by date, but can also be sorted by thread (subject) and by sender.

By Date

When sorting by date, the messages are sorted first by year and then by month in that year. You may find some messages from the previous month at the top of any given month. This is because the sorting is actually based on the original log file the messages are in, and these logs were automatically generated by the mailing list server from the messages it had received since the last log file was made. Since the timestamp on an e-mail message is from when the message was sent and not from when it was received, the list server probably only received these "wrongly-dated" messages after it had already made the log in which they "should" have gone.

Also, a small number of messages have a completely wrong date on them (there's one claiming to be from 1954, for example), or a possible date such as 1995 but with dates inside the message (such as in a quote) from a later year. These are all caused by someone's computer getting the date wrong, usually by accident but sometimes probably on purpose. An example of the latter is the "1954" message for which the author appears to have set his computer's date to "54" (remember this was before the so-called "millennium bug" became an issue) to make the message appear to be from the then-current Shadowrun year. In any case, messages like these have been inserted into other log files in the most-probably–correct location, though some amount of guesswork usually had to be employed here, so they may be slightly out of sequence.

By Thread

Threads are what all the hip, young, forum-raised kids folks these days call "topics". Their grouping is based on messages' Subject lines, and may not be entirely accurate because many threads got renamed due to topic drift or for other reasons, so those are usually considered separate threads in this count. However, messages whose subject lines differ only by starting with "Re:" (or similar), or by having different capital letters and/or punctuation, are considered part of the same thread: "Intro and Africa", "Intro and Africa -Reply", "RE>      Intro and Africa -", "Re: Intro and Africa", and "Re: Intro and Africa)", for example, differ only in the reply notation and some punctuation, and so these are considered a single thread. One minor drawback of this is that if two separate threads happen to have exactly the same name, they're seen as a single one, even if they were made years apart — such as these examples from March 1996 and July 1998. Again, a limitation of dealing with computers (and of me not wanting to bother with the extreme hassle of making one interpret message dates).

Another small drawback is that messages whose subject line differs too much aren't seen as part of the same thread even if they are. Typically, this might have happened if someone made a typo in the subject, and it was later corrected: the site will usually see these are two separate threads unless it only affects punctuation rather than letters and numbers.

Attempts are, however, made to provide links between threads that seem related to each other when they have partially the same subject line, though this isn't perfect, and you might see suggested threads that don't seem to make sense at first sight. For example, a thread about FASA is suggested as being possibly related to one about yourself as a contact. It's obvious when you remember you're dealing with a computer, though: "Yourself as a contact" …

By Author

Sorting the logs by author isn't yet possible, but is planned for the near future.

Completeness

It must be said up front that it appears the logs are not 100% complete: some messages quote or otherwise refer to ones that don't seem to exist in the logs, and there are odd gaps in some places (January 2000 for ShadowRN is probably the best example …). How and why this happened is unknown, but it's not something I can fix unless by some miracle someone turns out to have saved the missing messages and sends them to me.

E-mail Addresses and URLs

To prevent e-mail addresses from being harvested by spammers, they've been rendered unusable by hiding the first section after the @-symbol (gurth@xs4all.nl → gurth@******.nl). I decided to do this because even if most of them will be at least a decade — or even two — out of date, I know for a fact at least one is still in everyday use, and so chances are good that others are too.

On the other hand, URLs have been made clickable, but because it's likely that a lot of them would go exactly nowhere due to the pages or even the entire sites having long gone, they've been made to actually point to archived versions of the original pages at the Wayback Machine (though there's no guarantee a useful page will actually exist there). If you want to try the actual URL, select it, then copy-and-paste it into your browser's address field; alternatively, select the URL, then right-click or tap-and-hold (depending on whether you're using a computer or a phone/tablet), and select to open the URL.]<<<<<

—Gurth (wish you/were here)