… I don’t want my employer/wife/friends to see that I’ve contributed something cool to an open source project, or perhaps that I said something stupid 10 years ago.
I host and co-host a bunch of different mailing list archives for projects on web sites, and I never cease to get stumped by how many people are trying hard to avoid getting seen on the internet. I can understand the cases where users accidentally leak information they intended to be kept private (although the removal from an archive is then not a fix since it has already been leaked to the world), but I can never understand the large crowd that tries to hide previous contributions to open source projects because they think the current or future employers may notice and have a (bad) opinion about it.
I don’t have the slightest sympathy for the claim that they get a lot of spam because of their email on my archives, since I only host very public lists and the person’s address was already posted publicly to hundreds of receivers and in most cases also to several other mailing list archives.
People are weird!
There is even weirder cases like this. In the Squid project we recently got a message from a person wanting a very innocent message to be removed for no apparent reason. After a short investigation we found that this person (who is quite public in US politics, but not into Computers at all) thought the 7 year old post was from someone trying to impersonate him, as he thought there could be no other person in this world having the same name as him. Google found at least one more person in the first 3 links when searching on his name..
What I never figured out is how he found that message without finding this other person.. it’s not the kind of person that would go randomly looking into our mail archives (new or old) so he must have used some kind of search engine..