[dns-operations] list administravia

[paul at vix.com]

in response to my announcement that future subscribes will be filtered to
keep bots out, two people said "why are you making the list's membership
available to the members at all?"  one of them followed up as follows, and
the argument for completely hiding the list of subscribers from everyone
except the administrator is somewhat compelling.  OTOH, i like "open", as
in "your participation here is not a secret from the other participants,
even if you never post."  i'd like to get a sense from this community as
to whether anyone else cares.  if you don't care, i don't need to hear from
you.  if your views are strongly held/felt, please share them with me and
i'll (a) determine consensus from that, and (b) summarize to the list.

re:

# On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 04:05:27PM +0000, paul at vix.com wrote:
# > i want people to be able to see who else is in the forum.
# 
# Why do you want people to be able to do that?  If someone wants a
# message to get to the subscribers, send it to the list.  If someone
# wants to be sure someone else gets a message, copy them.  If someone
# wants to avoid someone else seeing a message, then they have lost
# - as its an open list & anyone can join & see the archives.  And
# if someone checks today to see if someone else is on or not on the
# list, they can't assume a week from now that the situation is still
# the same - as you don't announce join/leaves to the list.  And you
# can't stop spammers from getting the list - they can still hop past
# the moderators' questions & then grab the subscriber list.  And
# even if you had the list you really can't tell who everyone is or
# what companies have people on the list what with people using
# personal accounts instead of corporate accounts and the use of
# list-specific email addresses.
# 
# So I guess I'm not sure what the utility is of being able to easily
# see who else is on the list vs leaving a hole where spammers can
# access to the list of subscribers.