Message Summaries and Good Files To Repost

[ssk7882]

A few questions about some old projects.

A question about the old message summaries (which go up to
message 8000) in the files.  Did people decide in the end
that this wasn't a particularly useful resource, or did it
simply prove far too much trouble to maintain?  I know that
Gwen has talked about sifting through messages herself, and
about delegating this task to others for the Snape FAQ.  How 
have other writers been handling this part of the project?

If there's feeling that the message summaries would be a 
useful thing to have on hand as a resource, then I'm willing
to pick up where Penny left off, starting with messages
8000-8999.  Would anyone else like to help update the message
summaries?  Is this something that people would even *like* 
to see done?  Or do people think it would be time far better 
spent on some other form of research?

It strikes me that while the message summaries might not prove
useful for this particular round of FAQ maintenance -- they'd 
likely not be done on time, for one thing -- it might be nice
to have them on file.  Not only are they Just Plain Cool (I
*really* enjoyed looking through the ones Penny worked up for
messages 1-8000), they also would be, I think, a great resource
for newbies who actually want to do their homework and read
up before opening their virtual mouths, but who don't have the 
time or the patience to slog their way through 40,000 some-odd 
old posts.

I know that when I first joined the list, I would have loved
to have had such a resource available to me, so that I could,
for example, have skipped over those messages which seemed
likely to be irrelevant to any current discussion (the Nancy 
Stouffer debates, for example) and concentrate instead on 
topics of more lasting interest. Yahoo's threading function
is simply terrible; it doesn't get the job done.

What do people think?

Another question: in the Mods files somewhere, there's a
collection someone started of thought-provoking messages
that might be reposted when inspiration seems to be flagging 
on the main list.  I thought this was a great idea: unfortunately
there only seem to be four (4!) messages in the file.  Surely
we've had more conversation-starter posts than that!  Again,
was this idea abandoned for a reason, or did it just kind of
fall by the wayside?  Because again, particularly if I'm going
to be sorting old messages by topic, I'd be happy to pluck out
any that look particularly juicy and add them to that file
as well.


-- Elkins, who always finds tables of Things Sorted By Category 
utterly irresistable