I think it is safe to say that as an internet group/organisation, TPU is certainly extremly well extablished and has been around for a (relatively) long time - However I feel that it might be nice to have a something detailing where we've come from, and possibly a list of people who have been members here for a significant period (maybe they might have left now), say for more than a year. Does anyone else agree with me that we should keep a more detailed history of ourselves? I'm willing to help put together an archive about TPU if anyone else agrees with me about it. I'm also wondering, is there a definitive IRC log for #TPU - possibly kept by Demerzel.

One could use log.scm for Bobot++ to log #tpu :)

I'm not a fan of having all our conversations online for anyone to see. The Internet Archive does have snapshots of TPU web sites from various periods.

We (mostly I) have made various efforts in the past to maintain historical information. I'm certainly up for more of the same now, especially if run by others. =)

Keeping track of the past aint a bad idea, but it would be a huge job putting together an usefull archive. Someone would need to read all the previouse threads and sort the noise from the content. Perhaps a noise-content voting system might eliminate the need for checking every post before archiveing towards the future, but that still leaves about 7 years worth of threads to sort.
Volunteers?

It would be a shame to let all the good informative threads go to waste.

Nope, automatic wouldn't be good for an archive. I personally have no problem going through a good part of the history of the threads.

The actual idea here is not to preserve the "best of" but to preserve everything, so we have a complete history of the organistation. A 'best of' section can then be set up linking to the best posts/threads.

I don't like the selective censorship idea, but maybe you could just flag the ground breaking threads.

Yeah to what mop said.

About the IRC logs - perhaps have them avaliable only to long trusted members, say in the same way as the longe is only open to long trusted members.

About the past members idea - I was sorta thinking along the lines of someone who has been here from the start go through the history and pick out every important member (who was here for say more than six months or a year) - and just have a short paragraph on them
(Georaphical location, what they did etc.) - If we can track down any of the ones who have left why not have them say something about where they are now? Ideas? (As this would be sensetive information that people might not want completely avaliable to all the public - only avaliable to established members to).

I wouldn't gather information that people don't want to be public knowledge, but I don't think many oldtimers will have problems sharing things about themselves.

rdd, feel free to take on and start the project and do it however you see fit. If you need help finding info from way back, email Psion or me (not that I go back as far as "classic" TPU... I started more at the modern age of TPU. Maybe this summer TPU will enter its post-modern stage).

- taubz

I will start reading through the old sites, however (as I have promissed with so many things recently) I won't produce anything till the summer due to exams.

It would probably be much more efficient to try and find people who may still have messages from previous sites. I believe I have the messages from ~late 1999 - 2000. It would probably much faster and easier than wading through the internet archive.

I'm also not a big fan of the idea of #tpu being logged... most of the conversation that takes place there is entirely irrelavant and much of it is only said with a knowledge of who is actually on the channel at the time.