Re: New mailing list searchable archives

Derick Rethans wrote:

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Gabor Hojtsy wrote: I'm against this. MARC is not related to any commercial activity to PHP, and remains an independent party. Zend also has a searchable archive, so have other companies. Although it might be working better, it's still linked to a commercial entity and it's not PHP.net's job to provide every way of free marketing to them. (And yes, this includes S&S Verlag too). I don't have problems with announcing contests or conferences, but this is a bit too far.

Derick, Zend, as much as they offer an excellent set of services, does not have a searchable archive (at least as far as I can see), nor does their archive offer keyword highlighting or quoted text colouring, which are helpful in making search results easier to interpret. Also, I'm not sure that I understand your point about announcing this to the public. I remember that short ago a news item was announced about the International PHP Magazine (which is published by S&S, AFAIK) now publishing news items on their site. At the time, although *many* other sites (yes, including php|a) publish news items, I thought it was a useful service for the community, and I though announcing it on php.net was a good move on the part of the webmasters. Finally, it may not be php.net's goal to offer free marketing to any given company, but it should be its goal, in my opinion, to offer the community the best tools available. Now, if you think that our tool is not the best available, then by all means do tell us what you think is wrong, and if there's anything that we can do to make it better, rest assured that we will. Constructive critiquing is the reason why I took the time to publish this on other sites, including php|a and my blog, so that it could be checked out by the community we serve before being submitted to php.net for consideration. Otherwise please, be kind, next time check your facts before making this kind of comments. Cheers, Marco