[Building Sakai] Question about Nabble and the Dev List

[Charles Severance]

Hi all,

You might know that I do a lot of Python, wrote several books, designed classes, and teach classes.  I focus those classes on data analysis and use Sakai's mailing list as the running example throughout the class.   For example, here is one of the programming homework problems from my textbook featuring a well-known member of the Sakai community:

https://lti-tools.dr-chuck.com/pythonauto/auto.php?exercise=10.2

I now have a more advanced class and we want more and larger data - so I want to pull at least a years (or several years) worth of sakai-dev.   I I am thinking of writing a nabble scraper and have two questions:

(a) Does anyone know if nabble has a policy prohibiting or limiting robots?  I could not find one.

(b) Is there a way for a list owner to get  a large archive without scraping?

I want to make the data large enough that the students need to think a bit about data structures and brute force won't cut it.

Thanks in advance - and of course I will share the results of my student's analysis with the community.

/Chuck
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