[wlug_org] Editing mailing list archives

[Lindsay Hunter]

Could we all have a copy for our own archives to remind us what not to 
do in the future?

L
:-D

Ewen McNeill wrote:
> 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
>
>
>   

-- 
Lindsay Hunter
Computer Solutions
021 341 232
(4) 934 1702