(Glenn, I am not on the Stag Digest, please forward this to the members
so they know that the archive has been removed. Tks.)
On Sun, 27 Dec 1998, Glenn Merrell wrote:
> Triumph Digests, and the Stag Digests. All search engines and archives will
>be
> purged December 28, 1998, gone forever
These two archives have been removed. Unfortunately, a number of
people were using them at the time, but as you wish. It may be worthwhile
to seek the input of the list(s) as a whole, to see what their position is
given the spam counter-measures that are in place. I also wanted to make it
clear that the Triumphs list was not being archived, only the text files from
the VTR site that Glenn has asked us to index. We do not archive lists
without the owner/admins permission and without the list being aware of the
archive and how to exlcude messages.
> One dissatisfied person nets the search engines history, and you will
>need to
> search them the old way ... not at all, or write your own search utility.
>Seems
> like this turned out to be a Mr. Bean fiasco, instead of a Grand Day Out.
To be fair to Mark, at no point did he say "No" to the archive,
or demand that they be removed. He expressed his strong concern that it
may result in increased spam for members, and that he wanted to make it
clear that he did not want to cause that. I would encourage everyone to
visit the site at http://www.listquest.com/ and see how it works so you
can weigh the pros and cons before dismissing the service.
The Mini list has been enthusiastically using the service for a few months,
Marcel, the Mini owner who (and I'm trying to seek the write word here Mark,
knowing that you Admin the technical side of the list) 'manages' the list
provided us with old digests going back 3-4 years. There are over 46,000
messages available answering virtually any question about Minis and no
reports of spam problems.
In that vein, as a Triumph owner and member of a number of mailing
lists, I wanted to take a second to address some of the spam concerns.
First off, I wanted to make it clear that ListQuest/Core Networks
is ardently against spam, on all fronts. First and foremost, we do not
mine, sell or otherwise extract any e-mail addresses from the archives for
any use inside our outside the company, for any purpose. We have a
published privacy statement http://lq.corenetworks.com/common/privacy.html
and we are in the process of becoming members of Trust-E (www.etrust.org)
to further cement our position and back it up with membership of a third
party privacy organization (Excite, Lycos, Yahoo and many others are
also memebers).
Secondly, we go to great lengths to protect the archives from
roving spammers. The first step in this process is converting all e-mail
addresses (whether in the header or body of messages) to GIFs. This
makes it easy for readers to see what the address is, but difficult for
roving "spam bots" to nab addresses automatically. In fact we take it a
step further. The CGI that creates the GIFs encrypts the source so that
you can't use the source to get the address. IE the source for a typical
address would appear lke this:
/cgi-bin/text2gif?%3bOu%29yD2%2c%5dq%3d08II%5d%2fJw%29y%22%22hytXz%3b4%3cSA
We are also in the process of cycling through a number of different
encryption methods so that if someone goes to the trouble of reverse
engineering the code, by the time they write a decoder, we will be using
a new method (our plan is to change methods every 24 hours, if not sooner).
There is also no way to view all messages/addresses at once. A spammer would
have to go to each message individually to get the addresses.
Spammers, by definition, are lazy. It would be much easier to
simply subscribe to a list and keep all the e-mail addresses of members, or
grab past digests from FTP or Majordomo servers, than to go to the trouble
of trying to extract them from ListQuest. You would have to write quite a
bit of code to steal them from the ListQuest archives and also do quite
a bit of thinking. Again, spammers are not known to be big thinkers. :)
For those members who want to explicity exclude specific posts,
or all of their posts, they can simply insert the phrase NO ARCHIVE
anywhere in their message and it will not be included in the archive.
We have over 50 lists archived, free, at Listquest.com and we have had
virtually no complaints from the ~15,000 people those lists represent. We
have also had no reports of increases in spam other junk mail. That isn't
to say that it can't/won't happen, but to date there has not been an issue.
As well, the archives themselves are not indexed by search
engines, only the navigational pages. So, with the exception of someone
explicity linking to a message then having their page indexed, messages
will not appear in AltaVista or other engines.
Again, it is much easier for a lazy spammer to join a busy
list, save the mail for a few weeks, and mine addresses from there. Or,
join a list, download past digests in text format, and extract addresses
from them, than it is to try and steal addresses that are encrypted on
the web page. You don't need to write any code to steal them the "easy"
way.
As a final counter-measure, we can provide password-protected archives.
This is not particularly desireable as it means that those Triumph owners
who are looking for answers, who aren't on the list and privy to the
password, can't search the archive. However, given the other spam
countermeasures that are in place this is fairly unattractive and likely
not necessary.
I would be curious to hear from other list members about their
thoughts on archives and how we might be able to approach this issue to
provide a service to the list members without causing serious problems
in relation to spam.
I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and that Santa delivered
the goods when it comes to shop tools and car parts. :)
--
Jeffrey A. Campbell
Chief Technology Officer
Triumph TR7 Owner
Core Networks Inc.
http://www.listquest.com
http://www.corenetworks.com
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