ADMIN: Possible Change to the Main List Settings

[Kelley]

Just a few comments from me...

This isn't a new idea that's been batted around by the list admins, 
fwiw; it's come up many times over the list's life, and most times 
people have expressed the same sorts of concerns and potential 
negative consequences as what has been expressed here.

And, actually we *have* already taken the step once in making the 
archives of one group public -- the Announcements list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-Announcements/message/624

This was almost a year ago now, and so far no one has reported any 
problems with it.  More from me below...

Shaun:
>>I just tried a google search limited to the message archive of  
>>that group, searching for a word I know appears in the groups 
>>archives - my first name.
>>
>>Absolutely nothing was returned by the google search. 

Dicey: 
> And I just Googled "jakub s tomalak" and turned up exactly four 
hits: all of the posts that Mr. Tomalak has posted to your site. >>>

Okay, I was testing this the other day with the goal of getting 
Announcement hits; I know very little of how to properly do searches, 
particularly advanced searches, so most certainly that factored in to 
the results I got.  Here's what I did:

I used Google's advanced search option.  Chose English as the 
language, any format, anytime, and anywhere in the page.  For Domain 
I chose 'only' and entered groups.yahoo.com as the domain.  

The terms I searched (that I can remember) were Death Eaters, DEs, 
HPEF, aberforth, dissendium, Caius Marcius, and psychic_serpent 
(Caius and Barb, hope y'all don't mind). 

Now, these brought up hits from Yah groups, and most included hits 
from Announcements (Heidi, lots of hits from Chapter Owls and FAWA, 
btw).  When I tried to narrow the search to the Announcements list by 
extending the domain from groups.yahoo.com to 
groups.yahoo.com/groups/HPFGU-Announcements, I kept getting error 
messages.  Was this due to trying to make an improper search?  (I'm 
assuming it must be.)  How can you narrow a search to a specific Yah 
group?

Anyway, aside from all that, much as I love the idea of being able to 
use Google for our group's search function, my opinion is that our 
members' privacy always comes first.  Hm...any techy types here know 
of some way to be able to use Google technology to search the 
archives *without* making the archives public?  

I also believe this is the main benefit to making our archives 
public -- the use of Google for searching.  Other factors -- people 
lurking before joining/posting, the effect on the level of work for 
the elves (welcoming people, handling pending messages, etc.) -- are 
quite insignificant, imo.  In other words, I personally do not see 
any ways in which making the archives open to the public would 
significantly increase *or* decrease the work load of the admin 
team.  So, I do see the potential search benefits as the biggest 
reason to do this, but again, my feeling is that privacy comes first.

Just one elf's opinion...

--Kelley