On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Marco Anglesio wrote:
> > Is it trivially easy to do that retroactively, to documents that have
> > already been archived?
>
> The method that Ravi and I came to would be applied to documents already
> in the archive - essentially a script would edit the documents in place.
> The google archive would keep names in the cache for a while, but those
> would be superseded on the next pass of their web crawler.
>
> This could be applied to all email addresses (rather, to a regular
> expression which matched email addresses) or to a subset thereof. No doubt
> this question would have been the next one had the poll result been
> positive.
Ah. I misunderstood. I thought when you said you "weren't going to scrub anyone's name out of the archive anytime soon" that obscuring one individual's collected past posts (while leaving all the rest of us in the public domain) was a difficult thing to do. If it's such a breeze, and the number of people who feel very badly about it is very small, maybe it would be a nice gesture to obscure only the past posts of such people as a VSOP -- if they spoke politely and gently and in such a way that made anyone want to make a nice gesture towards them.
I thought it was only an all or nothing deal, which is why I voted no, which was Ravi's original question. On an all or nothing basis, I'm against anything that impedes google searches; I think the LBO-archive is a wonderful resource. But on a one-time, correcting for past mistaken assumptions basis (and intending such especially jittery people to use aliases going forward); and if it were extremely easy; and if such people asked rather than demanded; then I might have thought differently.
Michael