Hi folks! Mike Monett wrote: > Mike D. raised some other issues in a private email that showed > how the mail-archive presented some serious risks to silverlist > members. The Reply button on each page exposes the member's email > address to outside persons not associated with the list. They would > easily find the archives in a google search and could attack or > harass members at will.
> Soon afterwards, Jeff at the mail-archives posted a short notice on > the [user] forum stating that Mike's request to disable the reply > button on posts has been implemented. > This is a phenomenal response, both for the short time it took, and > the minimum of discussion. That about sums it up. Removing that reply-to-author button from archive pages solves the only important problem I had with the service. Now, if anyone legitimately wants information from one of our members, they will need to join the group and ask for it, giving us much better control over the situation. At this point I have no immediate concerns that would stop me from going with this archiving solution. The owners have been wonderfully responsive and I am looking forward to a low-hassle experience. I've begun some tidying up and prep-work with an eye toward starting the archive up within the next couple of days. Once it's running okay I'll update the web site and list configuration to acknowledge its existence and get the rest of the messages ready to send to the mail- archive guys so they can add them in. Then we can all start digging up our favorite posts from the past! <grin> Mike also wrote: > You can easily tell Mike's first priority is protecting members from > harm, and that directs much of his thinking and decision-making. That's true enough. This whole discussion has given me incentive to think really hard about what I and we can do to improve the services available to and through our community and manage future growth. I do have to thank Mike for blasting the barnacles off and helping to get me moving on this again. <GRIN> Settling on a strong archiving option streamlines the requirements for everything else and gets rid of at least one thorny problem that required a custom (read: complicated or expensive) solution. THE NEAR FUTURE: For the first time in years our messages are going to be visible to the web. In that time the web itself and the popularity of alternative health generally have grown a lot. That means, once they've been indexed, our messages will start turning up in countless Google searches on health and treatment issues. This is going to mean growth, new people, and possibly new attacks. Our small footprint in the past has allowed us to keep a very low profile. That will change. At the same time we are about to start attracting more attention we will only be at the very beginning of the process of data-mining the archives and creating documents we will need to help new people more efficiently. I hope many of you will volunteer to search the archives on topics that you're interested in and list and summarize those results for us. A focus on frequent questions and introductory materials would be especially helpful up front. If anyone has web space available, you can possibly offer our volunteers a place to post those documents on an interim basis, much like Wayne was doing for some of our files. THE NEXT STEP: I hope and expect that the pace of growth will be slow enough we can keep ahead of it. It tells me, though, that I need to focus my energy on providing us with a place to create, store, and present the results of our research, and that is what I will work on next. Since the core archive issue appears to be decided, what remains is to do something we really haven't done before: gather together and publish what we as a community have learned over the years. This will have twin benefits of making it easier for all of us to answer common questions and probably reduce the number of such questions as well. I need to look at the available community and/or collaboration site concepts and software. I don't yet know if a wiki is the best solution, or some other format or platform. I would really appreciate any of you with interest and/or experience in this area to share your ideas, the more specific and detailed the better. Web sites of open source software packages and projects, example sites that you think might be good models for us, and so on... all would be useful. LONG TERM: At the same time I want to start evaluating alternatives or improvements to the current list management software, in hopes of giving me better tools to work with and better integration with the archives. I want a system that is well enough designed and documented and simple enough to operate that I can recruit a few volunteers to help me run the place. I also need to make sure that one of my adult children could carry on or pass the group on without disruption in the event I become unavailable. I'd like to know it's in good hands if I decide to take a couple of weeks off for a second honeymoon. <grin> In other words, I want to *stop* being a single point of failure that could doom things. We have almost 700 members, only a few dozen of which post on any regular basis. I'm sure among our long-time lurkers as well as our regulars we have enough resources 'in-house' to make this job easier, especially now that the demands of the application no longer require so heavily customized of an approach. One can hope that relatively standard solutions can now meet more of our needs. So, please check in with your suggestions for the technical side of this project, folks! I need all the help I can get. I'm looking forward to where we can get to in the next few months... Be well! Mike D. [Mike Devour, Citizen, Patriot, Libertarian] [[email protected] ] [Speaking only for myself... ] -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Address Off-Topic messages to: [email protected] The Silver List and Off Topic List archives are currently down... List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
