Privacy Tips for List Owners about Archiving Choices

Privacy Tips for List Owners about Archiving Choices

Messages sent to the list are stored in the Archives, which can be public or private, however additional settings can be used to achieve other privacy levels. The archive settings are specified in the Notebook keyword. You as list owner can change the private/public setting but only the LISTSERV administrators can change the file location information, because that is tied to a Unix filesystem path name. Please send email to LISTSERV Administrators if you would like to change the file location information for an existing list. You as list owner can change the Confidential setting as needed.

The archive settings are controlled by two keywords: Confidential and Notebook. You would change these keywords in your list's header to activate your choices.

Confidential= Yes means the name of your list is hidden from people and No means the list name can be found by anyone.
File Location means the archives is either on the Web (htdocs) or not on the Web (home), on disk only. These appear in the Notebook keyword.
Access means the archives is either public (on the Web) or private (not on the Web or on the Web with a password required). These appear in the Notebook keyword.

Confidential and Notebook setting choices

Confidential	File Location	Archive Access	Name Public?	Archives on Web?	Archives on Main Web page?	Password needed?	Subscriber View Archives?	Non-Subscriber View Archives?

No	Htdocs	Public	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Yes	Htdocs	Public	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
No	Home	Private	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No
Yes	Home	Private	No	No	No	No	Yes	No
No	Htdocs	Private	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Yes	Htdocs	Private	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No

If you want viewing the archives to require a password, as in the last two choices, your subscribers will need to use their LISTSERV personal password. If they don't have one they can click "get a new LISTSERV password" when they first try to access the archives.

For example, if you wanted to create a list with a Web archive but did not want a link on the main LISTSERV archive page and you wanted the list name to be confidential, you would request: Confidential= Yes, File location= Htdocs and Access= Public. If you wanted to restrict it further by requiring a password, you would request: Confidential= Yes, File location= Htdocs and Access= Private.

Another example, if you wanted the list name to be public and wanted the archives on the Web, but you wanted to require a password, you would request: Confidential= No, File location= Htdocs and Access= Private.

The UVM LISTSERV home page can be found at: UVM LISTSERV Home. There are links to UVM's documentation and L-Soft's documentation. The List Owner manual at the L-Soft site might be most useful for detailed information.

If you need to talk to someone, please contact the LISTSERV maintainers:

Sharon.Provost@uvm.edu (802-656-1290)