CFIDS-L NOTICE -- Limiting CFIDS-L to a mostly e-mail group
Roger Burns
alt.health.cfids-action:
For awhile now, some people have been concerned that postings to this
group are too open to public viewing, since they are distributed through
a gateway to our Usenet newsgroup "alt.health.cfids-action". Anyone in
the world can read this group's messages on the newsgroup. Also,
newsgroup messages are stored on public search engines like DejaNews.
Government officials and others who may want to gather information about
the thinking of PWC activists can glean info from the newsgroup side of
this group and no one can trace back who is gathering the info.
By the way, the original purpose of setting up the gateway to the
newsgroup -- which was done long before there was such a thing as search
engines -- was to enable CFIDS-L participants to have the convenience of
reading this group by individual topic threads rather than having to
read all of the e-mails in the group. However, given the limited number
of postings to this group, there may be a net advantage to limiting this
group to a largely e-mail group.
We moderators (Roger Burns and Jean Harrison) are thinking of limiting
the newsgroup's messages so that only those postings which have a
special topic keyword in the Subject: line will go to the newsgroup.
CFIDS-L will thus be largely an e-mail group.
The group would then have the benefit of being essentially a private
email group but would allow certain posts to be seen by the public. Our
tentative plan is for the special gated topic to be NET. For example,
under this scheme, a posting whose Subject: line says
NET: Whistleblower report
would be distributed to the newsgroup for the whole world to see, and
would be archived in the public search engines. On the other hand, all
messages that do not contain NET: in their Subject: line would remain
privately within the CFIDS-L email group and could not be read by the
public.
We moderators ask for your comments before we decide to implement this
plan. Please post your comments to the ADMIN: topic of the group, OR
write to us at the moderators' private address at
CFIDS-L...@AMERICAN.EDU.
Thank you for your attention.
-- Roger Burns
Jean Harrison
Moderators, CFIDS-L / alt.health.cfids-action
CFIDS-L...@AMERICAN.EDU