After realizing that PICList members email addresses have been grabbed for SPAM purposes from piclist.com, we realized that the real-time archives provided by Jeff Keyser was also a potential target. We sent Jeff a nice email thanking him for the service and asking what can be done to solve the problem. The following response from him seems like an accurate assessment of the situation and his option #2 (passwording the archive with a simple and freely available from the list password) seems to me to be the best of the 4. I'd like to ask the list members if they agree and also let you know what is about to happen unless other options are available. PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL VIA THE PICLIST. CHECK THAT THE REPLY TO ADDRESS IS PICList-Request@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Thank you. --- James Newton (PICList Admin #3) mailto:jamesnewton@piclist.com 1-619-652-0593 PIC/PICList FAQ: http://www.piclist.com or .org -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Keyzer [mailto:jkeyzer@ucsd.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 10:30 To: jamesnewton@geocities.com Subject: Re: Iversoft PICList Web Archive Importance: Low James - Thanks for letting me know this was becoming a problem. The thought had actually occured to me before, but since noone had been actively complaining to me I figured that everyone was ok with having their email addresses on the web. I probably should have asked when I first made the archive, although that probably would have started a 6 month debate! :-) I'm not sure what the best solution to this is. As I assume you are expecting, I have very little time to implement any changes to the archive software. I don't even have time to read the traffic on the list! The archive has been running on autopilot pretty much since I created it in Dec. 1998. Even though I rarely use it myself, I figured it would be helpful to others, and judging by the hits it gets, it is. I see a couple obvious solutions to the problem at hand: 1. Make the list non-public or take it down entirely. This option would be simple for me to implement, and I wouldn't be at much of a loss, but I would hate to do this to the people on the list who actually use the archives. 2. Put a password on all of the archive pages. I could implement this fairly easily. (.htaccess I'm guessing, though I've never used it.) I could make the password something simple like "piclist" and even list the password on a link from the main page! This would allow humans to read the list but keep search engines and spam bots from getting at the content. This seems like a decent idea. 3. Figure out how to get hypermail to stop listing email addresses on the articles. This might be hard, or it may require upgrading hypermail, a major rework of the code, etc. A Perl script could do it but that is probably not the ideal solution since messages are always coming in real time. It's also nice to have the e-mail addresses on the messages so I'd hate to do this. 4. Whatever you guys may have in mind. :-) I'm up for suggestions. It's going to take me a couple weeks to implement even the simplest of changes, as I have midterms at school I need to focus on. If you would like I can suspend the archive until changes are made. It's really up to you - if you tell me to shut the whole thing down I won't complain! Let me know what you think is best. It may be wise to start a discussion on the list just to see what people at large think, but I don't have time myself to go through all the replies such a discussion is certain to bring! Thanks, Jeff Keyzer PS This is not the Iversoft web archive, it's the Realtime PICList Mailing List Archive or something similar. :-) At 06:40 AM 2/22/00 -0800, you wrote: >Hello, Jeff Keyzer > >Everyone agrees that your web accessible PICList archive is a great resource >for pic aficionados everywhere. As the administrators of the PICList, we >hear a lot of appreciative comments from the members about the search engine >and archives. Thank you. > >We also hear from time to time, from members who are concerned that the >archives publish PICList members' email addresses on the web pages. We >believe that this has resulted in SPAM being sent to PICList members. > >Is there any way you could strip the email addresses from the archives? > >If you need time or programming resources to make this happen, please let us >know. > >--- >James Newton (PICList Admin #3) >mailto:jamesnewton@piclist.com 1-619-652-0593 >PIC/PICList FAQ: http://www.piclist.com or .org -------------------- Jeff Keyzer UCSD EE Undergraduate jkeyzer@ucsd.edu