I was at a small party drinking perhaps too much port and I proposed in jest a scheme which now, even though I'm sober, seems like it might actually be a good idea:
Suppose we instituted a rule that every posting to debian-private had to have, in its Subject line, exactly one subject like tag like: [d-private-never] [d-private-YYYY] Some robot would file messages tagged [d-private-YYYY] in an inbox for YYYY. On the 1st of February YYYY, the inbox would automatically be made public. (Messages tagged YYYY would be rejected after the 1st of January YYYY.) Consequences: * Anyone who posts a message on -private knows when it will be published. * If you want to say something more private than the thread you are responding to, you have to make a deliberate action to adjust the year in the Subject line. But you can still do that. * If you want to say something _less_ private then can do so by editing the Subject line appropriately. You are then expected to appropriately remove or redact what you are responding to (including quoted text and the bulk of the Subject). When you do this you can still address the same audience as the rest of the thread. * There would have to be some guidelines on what kind of redactions are expected, since such redaction would become more routine. * We might expect these `declassification dumps' to generate the same kind of historical interest (but of course on a smaller scale) as time-based government records declassification. I would like also to suggest the following additional rules: * Someone who feels that a message has been inadequate redacted in a reduced-YYYY followup can complain to listmaster. If listmaster agree then the errant wording needs to be fixed up in the archive file. In the worst case there is a month to do this. * Message-IDs of messages posted to debian-private are not confidential. The upside is that someone replying less-confidentially does not need try to stop their MUA from including an accurate References header. The downside is that the mere fact that someone posted to a thread on -private, and perhaps the number of messages they posted, can no longer be (reliably) kept secret. Opinions ? Would anyone here use anything other than [d-private-never] ? Ian. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.