Hi, all, Our archives are public because we use a free archiving service (www.mail-archive.com). I should add that the archives have -always- been public, even before Mail-Archive, but they didn't turn up on Google searches because they were archived as digests. Search engines, in those days, tended to ignore large text files, but I think Google would probably pick up things like that by now (I should add that our e-mail addresses were fully exposed in those files). In any case, they were always there for anyone who wanted to download them from Liz's site and were never restricted in any way. That's the way of the Web--you can never assume that what you write to a group will only be seen by members of that group. The same goes for Yahoo groups, MSN groups, etc.
The button at the bottom of the messages allowing one to e-mail the poster is new. It wasn't there when we first joined the archive service. In the actual message, the e-mail address is concealed, so it can't be picked up by automatic spam harvesters (Yahoo does something similar--you can only see the first part of an e-mail address). I have not noticed any increase in spam since using mail-archive, so I presume that this device is effective, but it means that someone you don't know might try to get in touch, as they might with a Yahoo archived message. I have never been too concerned about providing security beyond the basic level, i.e., making sure our e-mail addresses can't be harvested by spammers, because (a) I am not the list owner and cannot set up our own archive service and (b) lace-making is a fairly innocuous topic. (A support list for divorced parents trying to get custody of their children would have to have higher security, for example.) I haven't seen Arachnes posting anything that appears to be any kind of security risk (like "Hi, I'm a 13-year-old girl and here's my phone number" or really personal details). Stalkers tend to be more interested in lists with a younger clientele. There's always a trade-off-- privacy vs. availability. If you want a list in a public place like the Web, you have to accept the reality that your messages will be available somewhere, to someone who's not on the list. The only way to avoid ever having your messages made public would be to do everything by private e-mail, to encrypt your messages, and to make sure that no one stored old messages on a networked drive. On the other hand, it does give lace-making more exposure. There's precious little on the Web these days about, say, Mechlin or Point de Gaze, and so a Google search on specialized lace terms will probably unearth some of our postings and lead people who are interested in lace to Arachne. Vivienne asked a while ago why only some messages appeared in a Google search and not others. My guess (since I wasn't looking over her shoulder while she was doing the search) is that she was using the default Google search, which hides redundant search results. For example, if a search brings up 20 results from a single site like our archives, Google will show only a couple of those results, assuming that the searcher will want to see results from as many *different* sites as possible. At the bottom of the page there is a link that tells you that you are looking at a limited search and that you can click to see all search results. I hope this answers most of the questions. Feel free to write to me if you still have concerns. Best wishes, Avital Arachne moderator To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
