[pianotech] real costs of running a listserv list

[paul bruesch]

To reiterate, unless you have some sort of forum/listserve/whatever that's
secured by SSL, you have precisely zero privacy from "the bogeyman". My
tuning business website is regularly crawled by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and
countless Chinese, Japanese,
Malaysian, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. search engines from all
over the planet. You can put crawler "requests" in a robots.txt file, but
(just like the doomed "Do Not Track" non-standard) no bot is required by
any rule, regulation, or law to abide by it. So you can tell Google not to
index your listserver. It won't. But that doesn't stop Hu Jintao (president
of China) from doing whatever the hell he wants.  There is nearly-zero
benefit in operating your own listserver. If you/we do, you/we must
maintain the OS patches and listserver patches and whatever other patches
come along for its software. Backups and redundancy and security and safety
must be maintained.

To recap my reiteration... if you don't want google to find you, don't post
anything anywhere in the internet.

As for JD being the sole admin (which I believe/assume to be the case),
that's not a good thing either. If he gets hit by a bus tomorrow morning,
we're SOL as far as any necessary administration. I think it's a good thing
that he's across the pond... that covers us with admin over more hours of
the day, assuming he assign a couple co-admins on this side to cover other
parts of the day that he's working and sleeping. Maybe an east coaster and
a west coaster.

Paul Bruesch
Stillwater, MN


On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 2:00 PM, Paul McCloud <pmc033 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Hi Jim:
> Ok, so aside from hosting and servers and such, all we're looking at are
> some admin duties and someone setting it up.  I'm just trying to understand
> a ballpark quote for all of this.  Once we understand the investment
> necessary to start, then we can have a debate over GoogleGroup vs Listserv.
> So far, there is the price ($0.00) of GoogleGroups, with the uncertainty of
> ownership, web bots crawling over our list looking for marketable tidbits,
> and the boogeyman.  Then, we have he private server scenario, which is more
> secure, more controllable, and more (fill in the blank).  Once the benefits
> and liabilities are understood, we can do a poll and see which way we want
> to go.
> In a way, since JD owns the GoogleGroup forum, he could pull the plug if
> he wanted to.  Suppose he disappears?  Then what becomes of it?
> Another question is, who would be the new owner of a new "PianoTeck" list?
>  It's a shame that the home office and the Board has decided to nix it,
> since the natural home for it IS the home office.  That option is off the
> table now, so now, what entity (person or orgnization) is going to take
> charge?  There must be some ongoing overseer and backup person in place so
> that it is maintained in perpetuity.  That was the role that Andy Rudoff
> played, and we need someone or someone(s)to take his place.  That person or
> group will also need to be responsible for training volunteers to run the
> operation day-to-day.
> Anyway, these are questions that we need an answer to, and sooner than
> later. Without these questions being answered, we can't offer any
> alternative to GoogleGroups.   We at least have GGroups for now.
> Just my thoughts.
> Paul McCloud
> San Diego
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jim Moy" <jim at moypiano.com>
> To: "Pianotech List" <pianotech at ptg.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2013 8:43:03 AM
> Subject: Re: [pianotech] real costs of running a listserv list
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Paul McCloud < pmc033 at earthlink.net >
> wrote:
>
>
> We owe a lot to Andy Rudoff for bearing all the costs ... Whether he had
> to pay $850 a year, well, we'd have to ask him about that.
>
>
>
> Mailman is free (GPL) software, so there is no monetary licensing cost.
> Same with the pipermail archiving component. And, of course, the LAMP stack
> on which it all runs.
>
>
>
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