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

[Stuart Seeley]

Agree. Fully expect mailing list to be public and discoverable through archives/search. 

As Bob points out, its fairly impossible to prevent individual sharing or archiving.. and it would be fairly unreasonable to expect this to be enforced...

How aboit irc and jabber? ;)

Stuart

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 26, 2018, at 3:59 PM, Bob Jonkman <bjonkman at sobac.com> wrote:
> 
> Strong bias to keeping the archives public.
> 
> I've used the public links to threads in the archives many times to
> provide advice for people looking for the best computery widget.  A
> private archive makes that impossible, and would rot the existing links
> people have bookmarked already.
> 
> And there are (were) subscription bots that receive all messages and
> create public archives. Sadly gmane is gone, but I'm sure there are
> others. Making the archives private does not make the messages private.
> And, as someone pointed out, *anyone* can forward their hoarded messages!
> 
> And address obfuscation doesn't work. Is there anyone on this list who
> doesn't receive spam? Anyone who doesn't receive spam already has
> adequate filtration and doesn't benefit from obfuscation.
> 
> And what about liability? A bad attempt at creating "privacy" is far
> worse than having public archives and leaving no doubt that there's no
> privacy.
> 
> Mailing lists that allow public subscriptions are public lists.  Making
> the archives private achieves nothing but grief.
> 
> --Bob.
> 
> 
>> 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
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Bob Jonkman <bjonkman at sobac.com>          Phone: +1-519-635-9413
> SOBAC Microcomputer Services             http://sobac.com/sobac/
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> 
> 
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