I'm in favor of putting the list in a private archive and having CDSS
generate a resource(s) for ONS callers and others. I think a
created-by-professionals summary would be more useful than the
sprawling archive.

I'll chime in on the survey when that goes around.

On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 11:51 AM Jeff Kaufman via Contra Callers <
[email protected]> 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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Luke Donforth
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802-448-4533
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