What's with all the mailing archives? [closed]

Question

When I google for certain questions, or problems I run into I would sometimes run into 'archive' sites - these sites contain forum questions or information from other sites that are extremely poorly formatted, and are copies of the well formatted original posts from various forums. An example of one of those sites in mail-archive.com and various similar sites.

Can anybody explain to me why those sites exist and how come they don't get banned from Google (since all they have is copied content that is really poorly formatted by bots)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

As far as I know, in pre-web-forum times people used to use mailing lists to ask questions. If you are interested in a particular topic, you would subscribe to a mailing list and from then on receive emails with people asking and answering questions. So people would not always ask the same questions, the emails would be archived on a server, so people could look there for their answers before posting to the mailing list. Even today some people seem to prefer mailing lists over web forums or Q&A sites like superuser.com, and thus the mail archives live on...

Answer 2

mail-archive.com shows mailing lists on the web, as you can see in the FAQ. Even in this glorious age of wikis, forums, collaborative Q&A sites and whatnot, mailing lists are still in wide-spread use (especially for questions/discussions about open-source software), and while most list managers have some way of putting discussions on the web, they are often pretty lame when it comes to formatting and navigational aids.

Dedicated archive sites provide better UI (the "bad formatting" you talk about is probably a result of mail agents mangling quoted text) and search capabilities as well as a place to host these discussions. As a list admin, I'd like that - less work for me. Then, if you sign up for several archives (osdir, mail-archive, Nabble, ...) you get redundancy and it's less problematic if one ceases operation.

As for search engines, why should they punish this behavior? It's actually quite good for them, since it makes content accessible to them which would otherwise have been invisible.

Answer 3

Right at the top of mail-archive.com it says exactly what its purpose is: turns your mailing list into a searchable archive. It allows people to easily search mailing lists for information whether they received the messages or not.

Another, similar purpose to these sites is to index Usenet newsgroups in a more familiar (to modern users) forum format. That way, information and questions and such that is posted on newsgroups is easily available to people who do not have Usenet experience, and more importantly, people who do not have access to a news server (which is becoming more and more common now). This way you can participate on Usenet via a forum proxy, not to mention easily search them. Even Microsoft uses a forum front-end for its news servers since it is much easier for users to obtain help via a forum interface.