General
General: What is Grokbase?
Grokbase is a new way to interact with mailing lists allowing you to easily keep track of groups and users you are interested in while being able to leverage what others have found interesting and useful.
General: What are the advantages of Grokbase?
Grokbase offers a combination of social bookmarking, XML feeds, full text search and voting to help you find and find and keep track of information easily and efficiently.
General: Why should I register?
Registering will give you access to capabilities such as bookmarking, tagging and voting. Additionally, Grokbase allows you to view posts by users and by registering, you can link mulitple email addresses to an account. You can still browse the archives without registering.
General: I'm worried about spam. Will Grokbase spam me and my friends?
No, as a mailing list site, Grokbase hates spam. Your email address is required to link your account to mailing list posts. Grokbase does not publish email addresses, either when supplied by the user or via mailing list posts. Your email address is also used to reset a forgotten password.
Grokbase will not:
- Give your contact information to a 3rd party
- Send you those snarky unsolicited "site update" messages
- Send you advertising
Groups
Groups: What is a group?
A group is currently defined by mailing list and people belonging to a mailing list.
Groups: How can I add a group's mailing list?
To add a group to Grokbase for archiving, simply subscribe the Grokbase archive user to the mailing list, archive@grokbase.com, and archival will begin automatically. The archive will be publically accessible.
Important: Grokbase does not respond to confirmation requests. If you are the list administrator, set up the account to skip confirmation. If you are not the administrator, find the confirmation email for your group in the list administration archive and follow the directions.
Groups: How can I import a group's list archives?
Grokbase can import mbox, GNU Mailman Pipermail and Hypermail format archives. Other archive formats are supported through migration utilities to the mbox format. For those with the inclination, there exist migration tools for Eudora, IMAP, mbox, MH, maildir and Yahoo! Groups. For existing archives in Pipermail and Hypermail formats, all that is needed is a publically accessible url. If you have archives you would like to import, contact John.
Bookmarking
Bookmarking: Can tags have spaces?
No, tag names cannot have spaces. Use an underscore (_) or hyphen (-) if you wish to use a space, however it's often convenient just to elimiate the separation altogether.
Search
Search: How do I indicate terms to avoid?
Adding a - sign ahead of a term will cause the search to return results that do not match the term. + can also be used to indicate terms that should be included but is not needed.
Search: How do I limit my search to one or more groups?
Add the group's mailing list address prefixed with "group:" such as "group:catalyst@lists.rawmode.org" to the search terms. You can search multiple groups by adding all the groups you are interested in, e.g. "group:catalyst@lists.rawmode.org group:dojo-interest@dojotoolkit.org"
Search: How do I limit my search to a specific date?
Add the date with the appropriate prefix to the search terms. Use the following:
- for a year: year:YYYY (e.g. year:2007)
- for a month: month:YYYYMM (e.g. month:200701)
- for a day: day:YYYYMMDD (e.g. day:20070131
Search: What is auto-complete?
Auto-complete functionality allows you to type a few words of your search phrase and the site will respond with what it thinks you are searching for by presenting you with a drop down list below the input box. If one of the results is what you are interested in, simply highlight that item and hit 'tab' or 'enter'. As you type more letters, the guesses will become more refined. For now, this is only used on the homepage for finding specific groups by group email address.
Feeds
Feeds: What feed formats are supported?
Atom 1.0 is supported. RSS 2.0 and other formats can be supported in the future, however all XML feed readers should be able to handle Atom 1.0. Contact us if you are experiencing problems reading Atom.
Feeds: How can I keep track of specific topics?
Everytime you "grok" a thread by either clicking the "grok-it" link or bookmarking a post in a topic, that topic is monitored in your "Is Groking" feed. The Is Groking feed keeps track of the 50 latest posts across all the topics you are groking. A link to the feed is available on your profile page identified by the  button. You are also able to access feeds of topics other people are groking.
Feeds: How can I keep track of multiple group?
Topics for every group that you save are combined in an aggregate feed for you that is available from your profile page under the feature called "Recent Topics." You can access it by clicking the button for your "Recent Topics" feed.
Feeds: How can I keep track of a specific group?
Every group has a feed that is accessible via the button at the top and bottom of each topic listing page. These feeds display the latest new topics with the most recent one first.
Browser
Browser: What browsers are supported?
Grokbase recommends a recent version of a Mozilla-based browser including Firefox and Mozilla. On Windows, Internet Explorer 6 or later is also supported.
Browser: Do I need JavaScript?
JavaScript is not required to read the archives, however it is required for personalized activity including logging in, bookmarking and voting which rely on AJAX. Replicating the personalized functionality without JavaScript is on the To Do list.
Browser: Are cookies required?
Cookies are not required for viewing the site but are required to log into the site. Additionally, if available, cookies are used to keep track of your display preferences between pages.
Abuse
Abuse: How do I report spam?
Please report spam by sending email to abuse@grokbase.com.
About
About: What did you use to build Grokbase?
Grokbase leverages a number of open source components including: Catalyst, Dojo Toolkit, memcached, PostgreSQL, qpsmtpd, Script.aculo.us, Xapian and Linux to name just a few. This site wouldn't have been possible without the developers that contribute to the open source community. For a short list of projects and people that helped this site become a reality, see the Credits page.
About: Who is behind this?
Grokbase was created and is maintained by John who is always looking for better ways to follow mailing lists.
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