Help for List owners and Moderators
Do you want to add your group to Onibasu?
Onibasu is geared towards archiving large groups where the number of messages has become unwieldy for searching with Yahoo!'s search capability. We aim to service groups that have a high ratio of useful information to off-topic chatter. We also prefer groups that focus on some aspect of health, nutrition or food.
We will not archive groups for the following reasons:
- the group is maintained by or is strongly influenced by commercial interests
- there is significant off-topic discussion that is not "search-worthy"
- the group is not moderated for spam or off-topic discussion
When a moderator or list owner approaches us, we go by a rough set of guidelines:
- the group has a few hundred members, or several thousands of messages
- the discussion topics often require some research
- incoming new members have similar recurring questions
- the subject matter should not overlap too much with groups we already service
These are not strict guidelines, and we spend the time to consider every group on an individual basis.
Finally, if your archive is not set to be public on Yahoo!, we will need to view your message archives before we make a decision.
Limitations and caveats
The major caveat to being indexed on Onibasu is that because we have limited disk space, we will consider removing a group if it does not get much search traffic. We don't think this is a problem if group members truly find Onibasu to be useful, and they mention Onibasu occasionally on the mailing list. We will always give at least one month's notice if this situation arises.
At some point in the future, we will need to upgrade the hardware that our servers run on. Our options are to solicit for donations or run unobtrusive advertising. The latter would be context-sensitive text advertisements such as those by Google (GoogleAds). Our preference is not to seek donations, but at this point, no decisions have been made about when or if this will ever happen.
We will never charge list owners or end users for using Onibasu.com with openly accessible archives. For private archives, please see below.
Privacy of archives
The mailing list archives are public on Onibasu. Because we do not have any connection to Yahoo!'s user account system, there's no way to know if anyone viewing Onibasu is a member of a Yahoo! group. This openness benefits the most people, as they are not likely to be a member of a specific group.
The most frequent issue is that some people use their real name in their messages, yet assume they are anonymous. We would ask moderators to encourage people to adopt more anonymous names or identities if this is a concern for them. (This is an issue with or without Onibasu).
A private password-protected archive is technically possible. We are reluctant to go down this path, however, because we cannot do this for free.
We put a significant amount of time and effort into Onibasu without any intention of profit. Our basic philosophy is that we don't want our uncompensated time and effort to benefit a small group of people.
What does Onibasu require from the list owner?
We ask for the following from groups that want to be indexed on Onibasu:
- an announcement on the mailing list when the search capability is ready on Onibasu,
- a clickable link to Onibasu on your Yahoo! group home page,
- coordination with a moderator for the above.
We provide examples and instructions for an announcement and clickable link below.
Example of an email announcement
You can use this announcement from K9Nutrition as a template for your announcement.
Example of a clickable link to Onibasu
Please see the K9Nutrition home page for an example of a clickable link.
How to add the link to your Yahoo! group home page
- From the Yahoo! group home page, click on "Management" on the left menu. This link only appears for moderators and list owners who are logged in.
- Look for the "Group Settings" sub-menu on the right side of the page. Click on the "Description and Appearance" link.
- Click on the "Edit" link beside the Description section.
- Under the text box beside Description,
copy and paste the following HTML fragment to the end of your existing description text.
<p>You can search the archives at <a href="http://onibasu.com/">Onibasu.com</a>. Enter the word(s) to search for and "check" the box for "discussingNT".
Note! You need to replace the name of the group with your group's name (and make any other modifications to your liking).
- Click on "Save Changes". There should now be a link to Onibasu at the end of your group's description.