On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
At 4:38 AM 3/23/96, Rich Graves wrote:
X-No-Archive: Yes
Anyone know if other search engines support this? I think such a standard would be a Good Thing. Of course there will be the odd private archive, and of course some nastyfolks might grep Usenet just for X-No-Archive headers, but this is a good step for casual alt.support - type privacy.
Even facetiously, count me as one of the "nastyfolks." If someone has made comments to the entire Usenet, any search engine which purports to index articles on the Usenet and does not index _all_ articles is misleading its customers.
AltaVista doesn't index web sites that follow the Robots Exclusion Standard. Does that mean you won't use AltaVista anymore, either? Interesting and correct opinion, but they're not saying they index _all_ of Usenet. They're saying, "We archive Usenet." "Well, what about excluded articles?" "Oh, we don't archive _those_ articles, of course," they say. The proposed exclusion standard is posted publicly. Ain't their fault that I didn't read that part of the FAQ until just now. Agreed, anyone really concerned about their privacy should be using anonymity/pseudonymity, but a temporary hidey-hole is a Good Thing. But I can think of a lot of reasons you might want to post something under your real name, or your regular pseudonym -- gaining the benefit of your good (or bad) reputation, mostly -- but on the other hand, you don't want that post archived. It's called an "aside." For example, I might want to say, "Tim May is a big fat idiot because of what he just said." I do want to say that, publicly, under my name and address, but for various reasons, I don't want that saved in the archives. Since X-Headers are readable by most newsreaders, and are in fact shown by default in at least the default install of trn, I don't think I'm doing anything particularly "sneaky." If you (or someone else) wants to make sure that I am on record saying, "Tim May is a big fat idiot," then you'd post a followup, perhaps pointing out that I'd tried to be sneaky by using an X-No-Archive header. X-No-Archive is like preceding your remarks with "Off the record..." People and bots can heed, ignore, or flaunt that disclaimer at their option. OK, you've convinced me that this isn't a privacy thing, really, but I think is a valid and useful thing. What's the alternative, really? If I want to say something, now, are you going to tell me that I don't have the right to request that you not take my comments on the record? That sounds sort of totalitarian. I either have to create a new, unique nym on the fly, in which case my comments lose anything associated with my name, or I have to keep my comments to myself. Recognizing "Well, the full context is recorded too, you can defend youself with that" only makes it worse, really. Just thinking out loud, my thoughs being recorded for posterity on hks.net and Exon-knows where else... -rich