Re: Any concerns about signing www*xemacs.org up for Google's Free WebSearch and SiteSearch?

Reply-To set. APA> See http://www.google.com/services/free.html APA> I sign us up for this unless I hear any well-founded APA> dissenting opinions. I guess this is as good a time as any.... There's recently been a discussion on Mailman Developers about the value and dangers of giving Google access to your mailing list archives. Note that this is a separate issue from the web site. However, the archives are linked from our website, and AFAICT from Google's FAQ they will follow those links. The value seems to basically be what Adrian has pointed out (and Kilian Foth in a recent post to c.e.x): Google indexes your site for you. Barry Warsaw mentions that a commercial search engine was donated to Python.org---and they ran out of capacity. XEmacs isn't that big yet (but why not? ;-), but the maintenance effort is a big deal to us for exactly the reason that we're not so big. So from the maintenance point of view this looks like a big win (not to mention the benefits of a web-standard interface for users). The downside is that, as Chuq Von Rospach puts it, "you're handing your list of subscribers to the spammers." I hasten to add that it's not that bad; you're actually only handing posters' addresses out. We keep the subscribers' list closed for exactly this reason. But the spammers can and do harvest list archives just as they do web sites and Usenet. I assume most people are aware of this. (If you're not, and the revelation worries you, you might want to look into Jason Mastaler's TMDA: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmda/.) However, I would be interested to know if people feel that the benefit to searchers is not worth it, and we should figure out how to close off the archives, especially to Google et al. Replies to me, especially if you feel the archives should be closed to prevent harvesting by spammers. I'll summarize in a week or so, and we can have public discussion then based on some idea of how people feel, if it seems controversial. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.