I'm
setting up htdig search integration for the mailing lists; once
that's working, list archives for all remaining lists will be forbidden
from robots.txt.
This should hopefully cut down on requests to remove items from the list
archives due to someone's name showing up on Google from posting a
message to a public list.
I don't understand. Why don't you just remove the e-mail addresses from
the archives? You've now rendered Google useless for searching the
mailing lists, and I'm sure you know that nothing else achieves its
level of usefulness...
I'm not sure it's the email address that's the problem.
If I recall correctly, at least one of the requests was from someone ("user-A")
who used their real name and their Wikipedia
username together (just once) in an email to one of the mailing lists.
This then allowed another Wikipedia user ("user-B"), who had developed a grudge
against user-A, and who had been blocked on the
Wikipedia, to use Google to find the real name of user-A, whereas previously they only
knew their username.
User-B then posted on their personal web site various things attacking user-A, using
user-A's real name. As a result, someone
googling user-A's name would get various results, some of which were effectively
slandering user-A.
User-A was then able to use various legal avenues to get user-B to remove this stuff from
their website.
However, user-A also requested that the particular message (which allowed the connection
between their Wikipedia name & their real
name) be deleted from the mailing list archives (or made so that no search engine would
index it), to try and prevent the same thing
ever happening to them again.
There may be other reasons too, but at least in this case, it wasn't the email address
that was the issue, rather it was the mailing
list serving as username <--> real name lookup table.
All the best,
Nick.