[olug] List Archives ???

[Brian Wiese]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003 23:18:10 -0500
Christopher Cashell <topher at zyp.org> wrote:

|At Tue, 09 Sep 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Brian Roberson, said:
|> The archive is protected by your mailman password....... If you do not
|> have that password, there is a link on the mailman log in page to send
|> it to you.
|
|Just out of curiosity, why is the mailing list archive password
|protected?  Why not leave it open to anyone?
|
|The advantages to having it open are that it can be google-searchable,
|and someone else in the world might benefit from a question asked on our
|mailing list.  (I have personally found the answer to questions before
|by googling and finding a result on a LUG mailing list.)

I usually agree with having it online an accessible too for the same
reasons, but to protect people's email addresses from spam and spiders
crawling over the net collecting email addresses from say - mailing list
archives - is a popular source.  I've received several spams in recent
days even related to "olug".

I would support public archives only if some spam protection was done in
the way the archive are available online.  THE mailing list archive[1]
does this nicely, though I'm sure it's all customized in-house scripting
that they've done to protect everyones email addresses.  If my email
address appeard as "<bwiese () cotse ! com>" ... I imagine I'd get a lot
less spam. =)

I have yet to see a mailman archive setup to do spam protection in this
way.  I believe there's an option, but it just doesn't work. =(

[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=debian-announce&m=106063776131603&w=2

 Brian Wiese | bwiese(at)cotse.com | aim: unolinuxguru
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