On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 12:47 PM Jason Cobb via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > Couldn't someone just zip the files and put them in a public GitHub > repo? If we really cared, the zip files could be encrypted and the > password could be put in the README, since I think most of the major > operating systems have builtin support for encrypted ZIPs.
Putting everything in one zip file would require Git to store a separate copy of the file for each revision, since Git doesn't do binary diffing. There are alternatives, like one zip file per message or per month or something; they're just a bit inconvenient. But personally, I think the idea of keeping email addresses hidden from spammers is pretty outdated at this point. I'd rather abandon it, and then be able to use the standard maildir format for the Git repo. However, I vaguely remember having proposed this in the past, and someone objecting to it. But I can't find the thread; searching for "scrapers", only this thread comes up. I could be misremembering. I can at least put it through the formal proposal process, by submitting a proposal expressing the sense of Agora that it's okay to publish players' email addresses on the web. However, that only accounts for current active players. If I published a copy of the list archives, it would probably be everything going back to 2002 (when the Mailman list was created, under a previous Distributor), so it would expose former players' addresses. In theory I could split the archives – a static obfuscated zip file for the past, unobfuscated files for the present onward – but ugh, I really don't want to do that. Agoran historical records have enough fragmentation as it is.
