On Sat, 14 Dec 1996 02:50:22 -0800 (PST) Todd Day <today@di.com> said:
>One of the things I've struggled with is making a decent index of all of
>my archives. (...) I'm ready to cave into these big database people if
>my list members can access the data in a form that I'm happy with. I
>just don't have the hardware or software or time to make something that
>will work well. If they put up banner ads, well, so what, the most
>important thing to me is that my list members can access that data for
>free, in a nice, quick, format on a fast machine. After all, I built the
>archives for the convenience of the list members. Frankly, the
>archivists would be doing me a big favor.
I think the key here is that you and your subscribers are benefiting from
the service provided by the archivers, because you don't have the
necessary resources to provide it yourself. However, this is not the case
for everyone.
To give you an example, we run a large mailing list server with an
extensive collection of XYZ-related lists for a customer (I'll hide the
topic so that the discussion doesn't end up focusing on the topic rather
than the generic issue). A web archive browser is available, with
database search facility. And the servers are fast, as a matter of policy
we refuse to outsource on hardware that we feel is not up to the task and
would give a bad impression of our outsourcing service. Now, we're just
running the service, and we don't have any claims to the contents. If the
customer wants to allow the lists to be archived on a third party's site,
that's essentially none of our business. On the other hand, if the
customer has NOT been asked, it is up to us to define the default policy
as outsourcing customers are paying us so that they don't have to worry
about mailing list technicalities that they may not be familiar with. I
also doubt they want to be told every time a person or robot tries to
subscribe to all their mailing lists.
Now let's say that one day we find this web site about XYZ, with the
usual ad banners, offering a big database of miscellaneous info about
XYZ. People sign up to read up on all the various aspects of XYZ, and the
people running the site collect advertisement dollars. And let's say that
a fairly large proportion of this database comes from the archives of our
customer's 100+ XYZ related lists, which were "sucked" without
permission. Well, again maybe the customer doesn't mind, but maybe
they'll get mad. They're sponsoring these lists for PR reasons, and I
think there's a good chance that they wouldn't be happy if another site
collected all the credit + advertisement dollars. It's not like there's
anything preventing the XYZ site from starting its own XYZ lists with its
own $$$. All in all, I can't think of any possible benefit for the
customer in allowing this usage of the data.
As a matter of fact, most of the MANY lists that run on servers I manage
fall in this category. They're invariably sponsored by some organization
or other that wants either revenue, PR or at least proper academic
recognition, and there is always a browsing service with database
searching. Or then they're sponsored by an individual, out of his own
pocket, and that person will typically expect some sort of sponsorship in
exchange for the data, to help recover his costs for supporting the list.
This is why I find these auto-subscribers so annoying. They cause us to
waste precious time explaining to customers why their data was "sucked"
without their control and taking corrective action. I'll trade 10
spammers for 1 archiver any day, as we have tools to deal with the former
automatically and without the customers ever becoming aware of the
problem. Archivers subscribe much too slowly to be properly and
accurately detected and invariably end up requiring manual intervention
after the fact.
Eric
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