Strange things in Export Members

[Wilson Logan]

Hi All,

The members list you see in Yahoo is a snapshot of the present. It does not tell you who *used* to be in the group.

PGO has messages from the very start of the group.  What this means is that there will be people who posted who are no longer members of the group.

The only evidence of their existence is in the messages.

Once left, you will not be able to access their email addresses and in the case of early members who had no Yahoo ID's you will only be able to see a munged version of their email address as message poster.

PGO was of course written to handle this eventuality. It has a person_history table which records people changing IDs and leaving the group.

Sophisticated as it is, it cannot however travel back in time & gather this information retrospectively.

Either we could have decided to export only current members which would have looked nice but then would have made message/author reconciliation impossible

or

We could have done what we did which, if you had been running PGO since the year dot, would provide all the information you require but which if you haven't, would at least let you know something was wrong instead of kidding on it wasn't.

Cheers,

Wilson.