[kwlug-disc] Should kwlug-disc archives be private?

[Doug Moen]

I don't personally require the archives to be private.

I no longer worry about keeping my email address private (with respect to spam). Nowadays, if I share my email address with a friend who doesn't use proper I.T. procedures, they are likely to have their contact information harvested, and now my email address is in a spam database. This has happened multiple times. So now I don't worry about this, and I use a commercial service to filter the spam out of my email.

And I don't share anything on the list that I wouldn't want to be seen publicly. I assume that all information that I place on the internet is public knowledge. Because security is hard.

I have a preference for public archives, but I would not want that preference to create a barrier to other people participating in our community.

Doug Moen.

On Mon, Nov 26, 2018, at 12:45 AM, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> A few weeks ago a list member contacted me privately. This person was
> uncomfortable participating on the mailing list because the archives
> are public, and show up in search engine results. 
> 
> A long time ago, this made sense. Stack Exchange did not exist, so
> sometimes people would search for solutions to technical problems and
> find them in our archives. That is much less the case now. 
> 
> There is also the issue of email address obfuscation. Mailman does a
> terrible job of this, and I am sure that our addresses are easily
> harvested by spammers. This issue came up many years ago as well, but
> we did not do anything about this. 
> 
> On the other hand, KWLUG is a public group that advocates FLOSS, and
> FLOSS has a bias towards transparency. 
> 
> I am not sure what the right decision is here, and I am not sure how
> we go about making that decision. I would prefer that this not turn
> into a bikeshed situation, but action by dictatorial fiat seems wrong
> too.
> 
> So, for those who care: would you be offended if we made list archives
> private? Why?
> 
> Would you be offended if we kept list archives public? Why?
> 
> - Paul
> 
> -- 
> http://pnijjar.freeshell.org
> 
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