> I do agree that what Aricka did (posting her full contact info in a > public email) wasn't exactly bright.
In order to understand what happened, I have searched this lady's name via Google. The only results of such a search which include her personal info inside .openoffice.org are in the archives of the Mac porting mailing list: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg01015.html. And I'm pretty confident at this point that she wrote to [EMAIL PROTECTED] because she found the following statement written at http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/faq/contact/ "Contact the Mac Porting Team Send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]" See? No mention of a mailing list there... So, while adding one's PRIVATE address and phone number as a standard signature to _any_ email isn't the smartest thing in the world (those who _you_ want to know already know, those you don't want to know... why are you sending them unnecessary private data, even if they *are* some private trustowrthy office????), a couple of facts seem clear to me: 1) this particular case has _nothing_ to do with how THIS list is managed, so it simply doesn't make sense to discuss how advertising [EMAIL PROTECTED] may have avoided this (even if a possible, general source of confusion for [EMAIL PROTECTED] is described below: while we're at this...) 2) it is pretty likely that this lady was given no idea that she was writing to a public mailing list because NOTHING in the page where she (or anybody else) would look for contact info for the MAC team hints to this fact. So yes, maybe there is a problem that the webmaster of the MAC porting project should fix asap. Ditto for any other OOo project with a similar contact page. General note on this list now: On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 11:23:10 AM -0500, Ken Burnside ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > while it's an erroneous assumption that things are private until > stated otherwise, it is a COMMON erroneous assumption. Would it > hurt to add, on the sign up page: > > "Note: All mailing list archives are public. Anything you post here > will be archived for any web browser or search engine to archive." > I was very surprised to read the last sentence above, because I was sure I *had* read something like this on the website. And in fact there *is* such a warning, but not in all necessary places, that's why I was confused. More exactly, if you go to http://support.openoffice.org/index.html#gcr you'll find, one after the other: "# Users Mail List (Subscribe / Archives) OpenOffice.org Project community support provided by a network of hundreds of experienced users. You must be subscribed to post messages. # General OOo Mail Lists Subscriptions and archives for key OOo lists " where the "General OOo Mail Lists" links to a page whose *first* statement (the one I remembered) is indeed: "All our lists are public. They are not private message centers. Messages posted to them are carried by, among others, Gmane and Google. Therefore, consider carefully what you say: thousands if not millions may read your words. Please note the first word: "All" So maybe it wouldn't hurt to copy that warning _also_ right below the direct link to subscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] HTH, Marco -- The one book on software and digital technologies that no parent can ignore http://digifreedom.net --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
