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

Chamunks chamunks at gmail.com
Mon Nov 26 12:23:37 EST 2018


I would ultimately say no, keep them public. However I have always found
that mailing list results on google have been pretty tough to dig out the
successful conclusion out of the weeds of back and forth conversation.  So
if anything we could possibly consider evolving past the Mailing list
concept towards something like Discourse which automagically publishes
email responses back to the thread/topic where we can add metadata like
which is the best responses.  This satisfies the need for a mailing list
which I enjoy but adds something a bit more rich that can help curate the
information for posterity.

https://www.discourse.org
Management of yet another appliance however is a bit of a mess, it's just
something to be considered.  The reason I suggest Discourse is due to the
fact that it's been made by one of the founders of StackExcahnge ( if I'm
not mistaken ) which means that it has many of the same goals and
functional benefits.

On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 10:50 AM Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> I have never ever searched in DuckDuckGo or Google for a tech topic and an
> answer came via an archived email message in KWLUG.
>
> So the utility of that is dubious at best.
>
> I don't mind that it becomes private.
>
> And if this is a barrier to participation, like with that person, then it
> points more towards making the archive private.
>
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 3:45 AM Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc <
> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> kwlug-disc mailing list
>> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
>> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>>
>
>
> --
> Khalid M. Baheyeldin
> 2bits.com, Inc.
> Fast Reliable Drupal
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>
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