I consider micro-managing posts to be a waste of valuable time. Unless someone has posted something having illegal content I think we should leave the archives alone. I'm thinking that if I decide I don't want my email address attached to what I have posted my option is to go get a new email address.
On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 09:22 -0400, Sharp, Chris wrote: > Good morning, Evergreen Community folks, > > Apologies for the long-winded email here. > > I co-administer the Open-ILS lists and I received a request from a former > list member to delete an archived message. This particular person discovered > that a Google search of her/his name brings up an archived Open-ILS-General > message from nearly a year ago and the person has requested that I (as a list > administrator) approve the deletion of the email (and presumably a single > response to it). In particular, this person is concerned with the archive at > mail-archive.com, which is one of two sites that archive our mail lists (that > I'm aware of - the other is markmail.org), and I have no idea how many other > ways our messages are propagated throughout the web. > > Incidentally, the message in question is a request for information about how > to unsubscribe from the list and contains only the person's full name (no > other identifying information). There was a single response to the message > in which a helpful community member provided guidance for unsubscribing. > > I initially responded to the person that this is just one of the risks of > posting to a publicly archived list and that there is nothing we can do to > prevent our archive from appearing in Google search results. He responded > that he was not aware that we publicly archive and would not have posted a > message if he had known. He has also contacted mail-archive.com, who have > told him that they can delete the archived message from their site with my > (our) permission. This is why I'm turning to the larger community for input > about this. > > 1) My first concern is whether it should be obvious that the Open-ILS lists > are "public", that that it's obvious what "public" means. In our case it > means that whatever you send to our lists is received by all list subscribers > and is archived on our web server, then propagated to other sites like > mail-archive.com and markmail.org, which are in turn searchable via Google, > Yahoo, Bing, etc. This is not explicitly said anywhere on our web site, on > the subscription page(s), or in the welcome messages sent to new subscribers. > The closest I can find is on the Mailing List page at > http://evergreen-ils.org/listserv.php where it says "There are five public > mailing lists for people interested in Evergreen open source library > software." I have no idea whether even this verbiage was present when this > person subscribed given the organic nature of our site. I intend to add this > sort of wording to the appropriate places in hopes of preventing future > confusion of this sort. I welcome everyone's input about this, including > wording suggestions. > > 2) Secondly, unless there are other cases like this where email list postings > have been manually removed (and I'm not aware of any), we currently have a > complete archive of all the communications so far in the Evergreen-ILS > project and I am extremely wary of editing the archives, for any reason. > That said, the subjective value of this particular thread is probably not > useful to our history and constitutes what is known as "administrivia", > something that the Mailman program itself tries to catch before it sends to > the full list since it has more to do with list administration than useful > content. More importantly than this particular case, I'm concerned about > where we draw the line on this. What if I decided to leave the Evergreen > community and would like all of my posts removed? I would assume that I'm > stuck with having them archived for perpetuity. I don't want to set a > precedent for micro-managing our email (or chat) archives. > > So, do I (we) approve the deletion of the thread in question, possibly > corrupting a complete archive of Evergreen's email history, but respecting > this privacy concern? Or do I (we) apologetically say that we want to keep a > complete archive of list emails and will do our best in the future to > communicate better about the "public" nature of our lists? > > It may look like I'm overthinking this, but I do not feel that I'm empowered > to make this decision alone - thanks for bearing with me! > > Chris > > -- > Chris Sharp > PINES Program Manager > Georgia Public Library Service > 1800 Century Place, Suite 150 > Atlanta, Georgia 30345 > (404) 235-7147 > [email protected] > http://pines.georgialibraries.org/
