[Mailman-Developers] Interesting study -- spam on posted addresses...

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 2/19/02 7:09 AM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

>> I was wondering how long it would be before someone brought up the case
>> for Lynx. Blind people I had not though about, although I had thought
>> about text based reverse turing tests.
> 
> :-)

Lynx access is a really gnarly issue. Lynx usage on my sites has gone from
about 4% a couple of years ago, to < 1% these days, from what I've seen. On
the other hand, Lynx is the litmus test for sight-limited access tools. If
it don't work with lynx, you lock out those with seeing problems (and with a
mother who has some macular degeneration, I'm a bit enlightened by those
issues. Thank god for Macs and the ability to make font sizes bigger...)

While I'll happily tell the "I don't like cookies" people to get over it,
Lynx access isn't something I can or will easily blow off. And something
geeks tend not to think of, you start getting into issues of ADA compliance
issues, which is a non-trivial issue we haven't even started thinking about
here... 

> It's the browser on my wireless handheld, and, in general, it doesn't
> handle images *at all*.  Nor will the microbrowsers on some people's
> cell phones.

Yup. And while I'd say today it's not a huge issue, 2-3 years down the road,
when the version of mailman we're currently noodging over gets into wide
usage, it'll be there, and it'll only become more endemic. If you design
stuff like this for what's Out There today, by the time it's written, it'll
be missing What's Coming...

>> So one solution would be to have both public and private archives. The
>> public archives have the email addresses obfuscated in some way, the
>> private archives would not.
> 
> Oh.  We're talking about *archives*?  Silly me.  I thought we were
> talking about maintainer addresses on sign-up pages.

We're talking about both, actually. It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

> It's ASCII text.  It's useful.  Making it into something else makes it
> less useful, 

But it's the kind of tradeoff we have to consider -- we ARE going to have to
give up some stuff in one place to make improvements in another. You aren't
going to find a way to better protect the admins without cost in usability
somewhere. It's a no-free-lunch situation, or we would have solved it
already. The key is to understand the situation and find the most
appropriate compromise, because a solution without compromise doesn't seem
to exist. 



-- 
Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/)
Will Geek for hardware.

No! No! Dead girl, OFF the table!