[time-nuts] time-nuts scraping

Tom Van Baak tvb at LeapSecond.com
Mon May 4 19:04:14 EDT 2015


Hello Time-Nuts,

If you have some technical expertise with the evolving web, please read this; otherwise ignore this off-topic post.

Normally people enter time-nuts through the main Time-Nuts web page: http://leapsecond.com/time-nuts.htm
And John Ackermann, N8UR, hosts this list at: https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
For 11 years now, the list is archived at: https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/
This is why when you want to google for time-nuts topics it's useful to add site:febo.com to the list of search words.

It turns out there are other copies of time-nuts postings on the web. Some of the "members" of time-nuts are not people at all but bots that scrape all content and then are re-hosted elsewhere. Among them are mail-archive.com, narkive.com, and gmane.org or perhaps others.

If you have experience with any of these three scapers please let me know. It is not necessarily a bad thing. But I would be interested in your experience or your insights into this practice of taking mailing lists and re-publishing or marketing them.

Secondly, over the past year we've seen an increase in the number of postings made by members through gmane.org. This goes beyond scaping and actually fakes the registration process and allows people to attempt to post to time-nuts without going through leapsecond.com or febo.com. Again this may not necessarily be a bad thing. But I would be interested in your insights into this trend. Or if you are one of these gmane users, how well does it work for you, and why did you choose this method in the first place?

If you have any information, insights, or advice, please contact me off-list. I'm tvb at LeapSecond.com and would appreciate any comments.

Thanks,
/tvb



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