[wlug_org] Editing mailing list archives

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <20080504222400.02D9B112949 at wat.la.naos.co.nz>, Ewen McNeill writes:
>I've received a request to remove a post made to the WellyLUG Mailing
>list about 18 months ago from the mailing list archive.  

Thanks for the feedback folks.

I've replaced the body of the message in question with a note that it
was removed at the request of the poster due to being accidentally
posted to the mailing list.  And regenerated the mailing list archives
(which unfortunately has had the effect of "renumbering" a bunch of the
messages, due to the dates on messages and the order in which they
arrived; presumably the various search engines will eventually catch up).

In answer to various points people made:

Jethro Carr wrote:
| - The message does not make any impact on further discussion. (eg: if
|   the user posted something which caused a thread, it should remain).

There wasn't any discussion following the post.  The only followup
(which only quoted the first line) was a "whoops, didn't mean to post
that, please disregard".

Peter Dawson wrote:
| I'm not sure that I'd trust search engines to observe the robots.txt
| request to ignore significant chunks of that archive, and I suspect that
| a significant part of the archive would drop off the radar if we went
| that way...

Most of the major search engines do respect robots.txt.  But to completely 
hide something in its various forms (month index, actual post, etc)
a number of alternative names would have to be listed -- which would
probably involve excluding the entire month from indexing.  And of course
as you suggest there are at least some search engines which don't properly
respect robots.txt

Mark Foster wrote:
| I'm not quite at the 'sorry, cant be done' as an answer to any 
| request stage, but the reasons have to be bloody good.

Yes, I agree with that.  It definitely has to be a very compelling case.
In this instance I know the person who asked personally and trust they
wouldn't ask unless they were particularly concerned, especially about
an older message.

Ewen