On 09/09/2007, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Armed Blowfish wrote:
Next option: 'Would it be better to let individual users decide whether or not they want their messages archived? If a patch were written to grant this capability, would it be used?' (quoting self from earlier)
Having a patchwork of archived and non-archived material would produce silly results. If you opted out, just imagine how meaningless the flames that you have received would be without the original context. ;-)
Ec
;-)
Messages can also get torn out of their original context when they are read years after the fact by people using search engines.
Let's take a trip into USENET history, shall we? USENET was originally highly transient - messages posted to newsgroups disappeared from public servers in weeks. Then enter the public archive - searchable, people can still find out what you said on the spur of the moment a decade ago. Enter Deja News, and the X-No-Archive header for those who still wanted that old transience. Enter Google, who bought Deja News and changed the implementation - rather than not archiving at all, archive for 6 days, and then the message disappears.
This article may be of interest: http://www10.nytimes.com/2001/05/07/technology/07NECO.html?_r=5&oref=slo...