[Imc-tech] Re: fiscal sponsorship and request to remove e-mail from public mailing lists

[Paul Riismandel]

Couldn't we just instruct google's crawler not to cache 
lists.groogroo.com with robots.txt?  Google and most major search 
engines are very good about respecting this.

Of course, we can't do anything about what's already cached.

--Paul

Zachary C. Miller wrote:

>I just had a conversation with a Green who had some concerns about our
>public email archives and Sascha just forwarded me some concerns about
>our archives also, and I've heard other people express concerns. Most
>concerns lie in the fact that searching google for someone's name
>tends to bring up their lists.groogroo.com posts in the
>archives. People realize that email isn't private but still balk at
>the searchability. Having public archives is VERY important to me as a
>matter of transparency. However, after thinking about it a lot I
>thought that with so many concerns abounding about the archives being
>on google maybe it really would be a good idea to switch all or most
>of our lists over to being "member only". Effectively that would mean
>that still anyone in the world could join the list and read the
>archives, they could in fact even join the list and mark their account
>for "no mail" so they don't receive listmail.
>
>Heck we could even set up a "guest" account with a trivial password
>that we advertise right on the listinfo page. Then anyone visiting the
>listinfo page could login easily to read the archives.
>
>With the archives behind a password barrier they would eventually work
>their way out of google and out of the google cache. It would take
>months but it would happen eventually.
>
>Another thing I could do instead (slightly less effective) would be to
>put in a robots.txt file asking crawlers to not index our
>archives. This would only be advisory and some crawlers might index
>anyway.
>
>Of course one benefit to having radical political materials being in
>google's cache is that no one can erase the record of our existence by
>taking down our server.
>
>  
>