Hi all,

Thank you for your input!  I had not considered any possible good sides to AI 
looking at our posts.  I'll put together a poll and post it as soon as I can.

Seth

On Mon, Aug 4, 2025, at 11:50 AM, Jeff Kaufman wrote:
> I'm strongly in favor of keeping the archives public: I think AI bots 
> training on our archives is a *good* thing.
> 
> Historically, the way people found this sort of information was searching.  
> They would type in things like "how do I call contra dances", "traditional 
> dances for families", "equal turn dances with contra corners", etc, the 
> callers list would show up, they would click through and read things.  This 
> still happens, but we're very quickly moving to a world where instead people 
> ask questions to chatgpt etc.  When people do that, I think we'd rather them 
> have as good information as possible, which means it's better for the list 
> archives to be included in the training data for these models.
> 
> There are definitely downsides, especially with current models that do a lot 
> of making things up and don't link you through to the source of the 
> information, but I think these are mostly temporary: combining the best of 
> models and traditional search is a problem people are working hard on solving.
> 
> Jeff
> 
> On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 11:36 AM Seth Seeger via Contra Callers 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi Mary,
>> 
>> The "Free for 30 days" that you see is a tier of service for the over all 
>> list.  CDSS is funding this community so that we can afford the premium 
>> level service.
>> 
>> However, individual user accounts on the site are always free.  (Only the 
>> list get costs money, not the individuals.)
>> 
>> Seth
>> 
>>> On Aug 4, 2025, at 11:06 AM, Mary Keith Eustis <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> It seems the free account is only for 30 days. Am I missing something?
>>> 
>>> Keith Eustis 
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Aug 4, 2025, 11:02 AM Seth Seeger via Contra Callers 
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Dear list members,
>>>> 
>>>> Since the beginning, the archives for this list have been public.  This 
>>>> was an effort to make information easier to search, to find, to link to, 
>>>> and to share.  However, the days of free information online have changed.  
>>>> AI bots are now scraping the web for data to train on and privacy is more 
>>>> of an issue.
>>>> 
>>>> *As we move to groups.io, Chris and I would like to make the archives 
>>>> private*.  The biggest reasons are member privacy and to protect us from 
>>>> AI training/scraping.  This means that you’ll need a free account on the 
>>>> new site to view the archives.
>>>> 
>>>> We feel this is a good change for our community.  Since the only barrier 
>>>> to the archives would be subscribing, we think this is a reasonable trade 
>>>> off between privacy and accessibility.
>>>> 
>>>> *If you have concerns about this change, please reply!*  (Once we make the 
>>>> archives at _groups.io_ private, we cannot make them public again later.)
>>>> 
>>>> Thank you,
>>>> Seth & Chris
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>> 
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