On Sunday, August 3, 2003, at 09:23 PM, Travis Roy wrote:
The main thing I'm trying to say is that we should somehow block email
addresses from showing up on the archive website rather then have people
stop it from archiving their messages. The archive becomes pointless if a
large number of people's posts don't even show up on it.
This sounds like a great idea. However, I would prefer not to see a login system/subscriber-only archives if possible. I understand that these are the most effective means of preventing others from using the archives for nefarious ends, but they are also an effective mans of preventing others from using the archives for benevolent ends. Specifically, I occasionally pass hyperlinks to archived material on various mailing lists to which I'm subscribed in email- or chat-conversations with nonsubscribers. Such as "Well, why don't you check out this post by Derek Martin, which does a great job of explaining this topic... <insert hyperlink here>".
Also, a lot of great information that one can get from searching the web comes from publicly-archived mailing lists. For me, this is especially when I'm trying to track down the reason for some bug or exception stack trace, etc.
I agree that spam sucks and I support reasonable efforts to thwart it (including preventing the email addresses from being released in the first place), but I worry that some of the ways to stop spam will just end up making the web a less powerful resource for getting information. And, if someone else is making a public archive of this mailing list's content, there's no way to force them to use the same protections, so in the end the effort might prove fruitless.
Just a consideration. Education is probably the best weapon there is, even though it is one of the more effort-intensive and least "automatable" ("scriptable"?).
Erik
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