Thanks for the info, David. Good points all around.
There certainly seems to be a mix of views and no consensus.
My own view is that I favor the archives being open provided that doing
so doesn't inhibit the discussion here. Lacking any evidence of that,
I'm going to leave things as they are unless/until something major changes.
John
----
David Kirkby wrote:
Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
Brian,
Sorry, I ment John there.
I'll just correct something I said, since it was incorrect, and whilst
not a concern specifically of this mailing list, I'd rather it corrected.
Also I will mention another technical issue you will encounter if you
try to make the lists private. You may never be able to do it for posts
within the last year or two, no matter how hard you try. Even if you
destroy the hard disk you stored the data on!
You don't need help from Mailman, *IF* you wish to do it.
99% of search engines (Google included) will respect a 'robots.txt'
file directing them not to index certain areas of a web site. You
could still have your page with links to the archives:
http://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/
so *anyone* could look at them (member or not), but their content
would not be indexed by search engines. You might be able to put 'meta
tags' in the outgoing posts with Mailman, but these tend to be old hat
and ignored now.
From what I can determine from the URL, you would need just this one
line in a robots.txt file at the top level directory of wherever
febo.com is.
Disallow: /pipermail/time-nuts/
Actually, the
Disallow: /pipermail/time-nuts/
in robots.txt
would stop the homepage for the archieves:
http://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/
being indexed too. If you left the directory structure at it currently
is, you would need to have multiple lines in robots.txt
Disallow: /pipermail/time-nuts/2005-June/
Disallow: /pipermail/time-nuts/2005-May/
Disallow: /pipermail/time-nuts/2005-April/
etc
to stop the contents being indexed, but not the homepage.
*IF* you were to stop indexing like this, it would be better to move the
data of the archives to
http://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/archives/
and still leave the homepage for archieves at
http://www.febo.com/pipermail/
Then just the one
Disallow: /pipermail/time-nuts/
would stop the contents being indexed, but not the homepage for the
archives.
BUT, I still stand by what I said though that I feel its NOT a good idea
to stop the information being public.
You seem to have a mix of opinions on that.
Also be aware, that if you made the archives private today, it MAY (and
I am not sure here) remove them from Google's cache, which it keeps for
a LONG time.
Type this line into google:
g8wrb davek site:www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk
and you will find two links, to pages I wrote, both of which are broken.
However, click Google's "Cached" links and you wil find what was on
those pages, with the date last retrieved in March 2004. So despite
Google not being able to update that information in 15 months (since it
was long since removed) it still keeps a copy.
Perhaps make it clear when people sign up that the list does get
archived, and so they should be responsible about what they say.
Despite doing it myself (both here and elsewhere), I think you will
find it's against eBay rules to mention others userids in this way, or
comment on autions in a public place. I can't be bothered to check the
exact rule - eBay seem to ignore their own rules anyway.
The people making the comments about the seller say they are accurate
and stand by them. Others have stated they had no hassles - nor did I
for that matter. Anyone reading the archives will form their own opinion.
Personallly I think it would be good if peoples email addresses were
not visable other than to members. The method used to disguise them
(replacing '@' with 'at') is hardly effectve. Unlike the "spiders"
used by responsible search engines, those used by spammers to gather
email addresses will not respect any robots.txt file.
A better method of discusing the email addresses might need a bit more
work.
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