[kwlug-disc] Should kwlug-disc archives be private?

[Chris Irwin]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 03:45:07AM -0500, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc 
wrote:

>A few weeks ago a list member contacted me privately. This person was
>uncomfortable participating on the mailing list because the archives
>are public, and show up in search engine results.

Personally, I wouldn't sign up for a mailing list without being able to 
review the content before. I don't want to discourage anybody from 
participating, however. Mikalai's suggestion of an anonymous list- 
specific address is probably the best option -- not just for kwlug, but 
for other services as well.

>There is also the issue of email address obfuscation. Mailman does a
>terrible job of this, and I am sure that our addresses are easily
>harvested by spammers. This issue came up many years ago as well, but
>we did not do anything about this.

There *is* an argument for obfuscating email addresses in the archive to 
protect against crawling.

Like Doug noted, my address also gets leaked through real-life contacts 
(who use "find my friends" functionality to share their contacts with 
websites).

>So, for those who care: would you be offended if we made list archives
>private? Why?

Another concern is if the archives are private, are "we" offering an 
assumption of privacy? I have KWLug archives going back to January 2008.  
What would happen if I (or somebody else with extensive archives) 
published them?

I don't intend that to sound like a threat (in case it came across that 
way). However, do we need to start attaching disclaimers after our 
signatures ("This message for the intended recipients only" -- ignoring 
the non-enforceable nature of those), or discussing the licensing 
implications of participating in the list?


(As an aside -- "TEST". I switched email providers this week)

-- 

Chris Irwin
email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
 xmpp:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
  web: https://chrisirwin.ca