[Mailman-Users] GMane?

[Brad Knowles]

At 1:34 AM -0500 2006-02-17, John A. Martin wrote:

>  Lars said, "The mailman people requested that they be removed", see
>  <http://article.gmane.org/gmane.discuss/9291>.

	IIRC, we requested that they be removed over a year ago, the last 
time we ran into this issue -- and when Lars found out that someone 
had nominated these lists for inclusion at Gmane without getting our 
approval, and when he found out that this was done in violation of 
his own policies of checking to make sure that this was approved by 
the listowner.

	So, we come back to this issue again, and what do we find?  Just 
what exactly do you think our response should have been, once we 
discovered that our request to keep our lists out of Gmane had been 
violated a second time?

>  Did you have a similar view of Altavista ten years or so ago?

	Before the existence of the ROBOTS.TXT standard, yes.


	Good web indexing sites will follow the rules that you set out 
for your website, and bad ones don't follow those rules.

	Hell yes, I will definitely work to prohibit bad web indexing 
sites from being able to access any site that I have any influence 
over.

>  List owners (or more accurately, whoever subscribes a list to Gmane)
>  have a number of choices (Posting allowed, Read only, List member only
>  posting, No posting through Gmane, Encrypt addresses, Spam tagging,
>  and more).  ISTM choosing the appropriate posting option and encrypted
>  address would go a long way toward reducing the nuisances.

	Not really.  My problem is only partly with the technical matters 
in question.

	My problem really has more to do with the fact that Gmane is 
repeatedly violating their own policies for proper behaviour, and 
setting up gateways of our mailing lists without our approval, and 
this leads me to seriously question everything they do.

>  Gmane is a Free Public Service.  Like the man said, "If it cannot be
>  abused, it is not free".  Such is the world.
>
>  Blame Gmane because bad people use it. :)

	No, blame Gmane because it is either run poorly or is run in bad 
faith by bad people who pretend to be good.


	There's a saying which goes:

		Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained
		by incompetence.

	Well, there's certainly either a fair amount of incompetence 
here, or a good amount of malice.

	You choose which you wish to believe in.

	I choose to believe that this most recent incidence is a result 
of incompetence and not outright malice, but at the end of the day I 
don't see that this really makes a difference.

>  I have suggested to list owners that sooner or later someone will
>  likely subscribe their list to Gmane.  This is because it is there and
>  there are folks that like to use it.  To make the best of it I suggest
>  that list owners might want to subscribe their lists themselves and
>  perhaps get a better place (name) in the Gmane hierarchy but, most
>  importantly, so they can choose the options themselves.  Also they can
>  more easily copy old archives to Gmane.

	Right, so everyone should go down to the local police station and 
get an RFID chip implanted and registered, because sooner or later 
that's what's going to happen anyway.

	Sorry, I'm not buying it.

>  Do you really think anyone at Gmane subscribed the mailman-* lists?
>  Don't you imagine that someone, probably a subscriber, subscribed the
>  list?

	At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.