[GRASS5] mailing list archives

[Roger Bivand]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Helena Mitasova wrote:

> Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 12:24:32PM +0200, Markus Neteler wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 11:11:03AM +0100, Paul Kelly wrote:
> > 
> > > > It will work for now but I think as Bernhard says we can't really keep the
> > > > mailing list archives secret from the rest of the internet. It means people
> > > > are less likely to come across GRASS while searching for the solution to a
> > > > problem.
> > >
> > > I agree almost, but on the other hand the privacy (email addresses) must be
> > > somewhat protected. Mailman isn't very clever to scramble the email
> > > addresses (or I don't know how to do that, hints are welcome).
> > 
> > Address scrambling is not helping a lot in my opinion.
> > Thus there are many places my email addresses are published unscrambled.
> > A good (local) spamfilter gives some protection,
> > but in the long run the internet community as to come
> > to better solutions which is outside of the focus of this group.
> > You might want to support efforts like http://www.cauce.org/.
> > 
> > Bottom line: scrambling email addresses or protecting webpages
> > behind authentification does more damage then good as I can see it.
> > 
> >   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >    Part 1.2Type: application/pgp-signature
> 
> I agree with Bernhard on this - I have my ncsu.edu email published in
> many places on the web and I get little spam there (and in fact until
> recently I did not get any at all). On the other hand, my hotmail
> address is not published anywhere but I use it for on-line purchases and
> I get ton of spam there every day. I get no spam at all on care2.com
> So at least for me it depends more on the filters and how I use the
> email, than on publishing the email address.

I also agree with Bernhard, as things are, spam filtering is unfortunately
necessary for everone everywhere, and email address mangling doesn't seem
to be the issue. I have the same experience as Helena, a work address
published freely and not much spam (about 50% spam before a filter was
implemented on the mail server), and a home address from a commercial ISP
with 50 spam (or more) to one real message - this address is not published
anywhere. I use spamassassin and recommend it or similar to others.

There are in fact, as Bernhard says, two issues: 1) revealing email 
addresses in an archive - I believe this can be mangled a bit by inserting 
" at " for "@", but you don't have to be bright to see that this doesn't 
have much life left - like other mangling schemes; 2) the important 
indexing and searchability issue, which is one of the effective ways of 
attracting attention. Searching on Google for "regularized splines" should 
lead to GRASS and does. 
>  
> Anyway, it would be nice to keep the GRASS mailing list archive open. 
> 
Including open for crawlers - we benefit from other projects' archives 
being externally indexed (most of my answers to compiling bits of 
libes/gis under MinGW came from various list archives), so we ought to at 
least consider ourselves a resource also for people who aren't in GIS, but 
are facing similar development questions.

But it boils down to running it, and if it can't be run open within the 
contraints that apply, then it can't.

Roger

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 93 93
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no