[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam onpostedaddresses...

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Chuq" == Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> writes:

    Chuq> Are there any other benefits to being googled than being a
    Chuq> walking billboard to the list?

Yes.  I do see a fair number of "non-subscriber" posts that go "we
need to do job X, and according to a post I dug up googling for `job
X' you can do this".  It's hard to see how you can replace google for
that purpose for XEmacs ... many values of "job X" you wouldn't
normally associate with a text editor, even XEmacs.  Those people are
not going to go fishing in our archives, even if we had a reliable
search function.  So there is a lot of information in those archives
that people are not going to be able to access without Google.

OTOH, I suspect that's pretty rare for Mailman, or even Python.  Sure,
you'll see the "job X" post, but they'll already know that Mailman or
Python might do it, usually no need for Google, and definitely not to
dig into ML archives.  XEmacs is a special case.

I'll admit I'm not proud of the fact that it also publishes all those
addresses, but I've got other things to do than sink a lot of time
into changing something that's a long established practice at my
organization, set up by somebody who knows a lot more about all this
than me (and I'd really rather it stayed that way), and nominally
a third person's job in any case.


-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
              Don't ask how you can "do" free software business;
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