Cindy (Who?) wrote:
> I've never liked archives.  I had the experience of new people coming
> onto my forum, browsing the archives, becoming incensed at some
> previous article or other that had mentioned them and demanding that I
> remove said offending articles.  (Mine are a contentious lot.)  My
> solution was to drop archives entirely.

What is the nature of you list, what type of list is it?

Someone reading your list archives does not, I think, have the right to
request, let alone demand, that something written by someone else be removed
unless it is provable libel/slander or a violation of copyright.  If the
person simply doesn't like it, well, that's too bad, tough luck.

As I said, I don't know what type of list(s) you run, but all of mine are
of the "academic discussion" type, and the list archives are viewed as an
asset: one can look up previous discussion before posting the same question
yet again, or find something one didn't save at the time (or did but lost).
It is also a historical record of the list, and a record of what the
concerns of the subscribers, and the profession at large, have been at any
given time (they change with the years).  It may be that the list archives
contain information obtainable nowhere else.

If someone wants to subscribe to my largest list, with archive back to
1990, just to see what he can gripe about, he's welcome.  With close to
112,000 individual items, if he reads two weeks of archives per day it will
take him over a year to catch up to today, and then he will have to read
the most current year's postings.

I approve of the archives, and of the ability of the listowner to edit the
archives when he must.

Douglas Winship   [log in to unmask]