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

[Mikalai Birukou]

In a physically situated party, people walk around. Someone stops by a 
group of people, listens for a minute, finds conversation interesting, 
finds people talking safe and comfortable, and joins the group.

Openness of our de facto semi-public conversations is a plus, that 
allows people to safely join our group. Private conversations must 
happen privately between members (join the after party!).

As for email addresses being public, make an alias in their gmail for 
use with mail lists.

On 2018-11-26 3:45 a.m., 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
>