[Sussex] List Policy (Removal of submissions)

[Andy Smith]

Hi Steve,

On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 12:26:50PM +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:
> A few days back the admins for the LUG.ORG.UK server were contacted by
> an ex Sussex member asking for his postings to our list to be deleted.
> They, rightly, passed the buck to me as list admin.  Since then I
> haven't heard from the person so I've taken no action and I haven't been
> told that the admins have done anything either.

<hat role="admin">
The request was made from an email address that does not accept
replies, and as further information is required, there is little
we/you can do.
</hat>

> So what should we do?  My own preference is to say that the mail list is
> a record of the communications of this group and as such are sacrosanct.

There will occasionally be honest mistakes made where personal
information is posted to the list, especially where the
reply-to-list is used as in this case (something I would recommend
strongly against mainly for this reason).

However, the amount of hassle caused by the tiny minority of kooks
who think they can rewrite history and are willing to threaten legal
action to do so, does in my strictly personal opinion, mean that I
believe that all public lists[1] should be publicly archived and
that all public list archives should be archived in multiple
locations under different administrative control.

Removing information from such an archive would then become a much
larger task and this would discourage frivolous requests.  This
probably does screw over the poor buggers who accidentally reply
on-list with their full address, but sorry, there are nasty pieces
of work out there who would gladly devote time and money in shutting
down the entire of lug.org.uk just because the evidence of them
losing an Internet Argument are archived for all to see.

Regardless of what your rules are, you may at some point receive a
properly formed take down notice which either you or we (lug.org.uk
admins) will be required to act upon.  If you believe in the
sacrosanct nature of the archives I would encourage you to start
planning for distributing them *now*.  You may also want to clarify
that anyone posting here is granting you/us the right to publish as
it is unclear that you/we do have this right for historical mails.

Cheers,
Andy

[1] "public lists" as in anyone can be a member.
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