Re: A surprising discovery?

[shawl@torchlake.com (Jonathan Shawl)]

Hi Axel, Ray, and all:

Sorry, maybe I missed something in the past. I didn't know about the "non
technical" list until today. I signed up to it just now so this should be my
last "non technical" message to the sub related list. I will take this
discussion there in the future now that I know about it.
I like the idea of a public list that just includes the informative "gems"
without all the dirt. I think that would help the new members to the list. It
would show them things that have already been covered by the group without
having to read a 1000+ useless e-mails to find the gems. I realize someone would
have to weed out the list and that would be a big job at first but it's just an
idea to think about. As it is now it can be hard to find the gems because of the
shear size of the archives. Maybe I should look first, but is there any type of
list search engine on the site yet? If not, I think it would be a great idea to
add one, for members use that is.
When I went to look at the list sign up page,  I now see a (New?) big, flashing,
red disclaimer (this is good), but I don't remember seeing it when I signed up
many months ago. Part of it says,
"All messages sent through our mailing lists are archived and open for public
inspection on this web site."
This statement leads me to believe that you must come to the p-sub site to get
into and read the archives. This is not the case at this time. This don't bother
me so much, but getting into them directly from outside the site without the
disclaimers does not sound like a good idea to me. It's not so much that I have
said anything in the group that I would want removed or hidden, but anything we
say taken out of the context of the group and the list has the potential to be
taken or used the wrong way. I guess until something changes I will have to be
very careful and reconsider everything I might post to the group, as now I know
the "group" is the world, not just 92 P-subers. If you don't hear much from me
any more, this would be the reason I'm keeping quiet.
A possible solution;
I have been told that the site archives can be protected. To keep the search
engine robots from going through archives in the future, you can create a file
called robots.txt. The file should look like the following,

User-agent: *
Disallow: /mlist/archive/
Disallow: /path/to/any/other/folder/you/do_not/want/indexed/

This file needs to be placed in the sites root directory so the robots can
access it by going to, http://www.psubs.org/robots.txt
More information on this is available at;
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/exclusion-admin.html
http://www.altavista.com/av/content/addurl_exclude.htm
After this is done then you can re-register the site with the search engines and
they will remove the archive references from their index.

Jon Shawl


Axel Iehle wrote:

> Hi all,

[Snip]

> ...Having a look to the archive before registering is a good way
> to get an idea of what the list is all about. I did it, like most of us.
> But perhaps could we split the archive page into: complete archive
> (accessible to members) and sample archive (accessible to all).
> In the last one, names would be omitted from the original messages,
> and these messages cover, say, the last 3-6 months.
>
> I know all this should be discussed in the ther list: the non-technical one.
> Sorry.
>
> Axel
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > This is not about subs, but about the group in general.
> > I was doing some surfing today and did a few searches at
> > http://www.altavista.com/
> > I was searching for the name of one of us in the P-sub group and was
> > surprised to find about 70+ links.
> > Most of them went directly to the P-sub archives. Then I tried my name
> > and found the same thing, lots of links. I tried this with other names
> > used in the P-sub group, same story. I had not thought about it being so
> > open to the internet public. I'm must be wrong, but I thought the
> > archive of e-mail was only for the registered members of the p-sub
> > group. I guess I'm just surprised to learn this, maybe I shouldn't be.
> > I'm just wondering what some of you think about this?
> >
> > Jon Shawl
> >
> >