I agree in principle, and I'm certainly well aware of how many times the
'should I edit my archives?' discussion has come up on LSTOWN-L and
LSTSRV-L in the decade-and-a-half that I've been at L-Soft.  It's almost
always in the context of "some jerk is threatening to sue me because he
accidentally clicked the Reply-All button".  But this wasn't a case of
someone saying something embarrassing or incriminating or even a case of
an errant auto-reply going to the list.  It was a case of link spam in a
publicly searchable archive hosted on our own server.  Philosophical
discussions aside, I'd prefer that the LSTOWN-L archives not be serving
links to trojans on third-party sites.  I don't think I've ever edited the
LSTOWN-L archive before, but in this case, it was the right thing to do.

I'm sure someone will howl 'but that's a slippery slope!' It isn't,
really.  The fact that messages *can* be deleted from list archives is no
secret -- it's what the 'delete' icon in LISTSERV 16.0 does.  Whether they
*should* be deleted is a policy issue.  Not knowingly hosting link spam is
a pretty reasonable and defensible policy, and one that protects our
online reputation.  If you've got a different policy on your own LISTSERV
site, I don't have a problem with that.  If the Google cache and the
Wayback machine serve the trojan link, I don't have a problem with that,
either.  I don't manage their servers.  I do manage this one, and we work
pretty hard not to let spammers profit at our expense.  No apologies
there.

If the owner of the spamvertised site wants to complain about the deletion
and how I'm squashing their freedom of speech, I'll be happy to discuss it
with them in person.  They can bring their lawyer, and I'll bring mine.
Just name the time and place :)

--
Liam Kelly
Senior Consulting Analyst
L-Soft international
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