Chris Little [SMTP:clittle@renlearn.ca] wrote:

When the question first came up of allowing members to view the membership list, one of the moderators started a poll (around the beginning of January). That'd be me.

Unfortunately polling in this group is limited to moderators. The moderators then decided to discuss the issue amongst themselves and they haven't reported back.

Hoo, boy, I seem to have dropped the ball on several counts here. First, my apologies for not cancelling the poll after discovering polling was limited to moderators. Second, my apologies for not reporting back to the group on the results of our discussion (I'm taking responsibility for this, since I'm the one who opened the can of worms in the first place). We identified a potential problem with spam email harvesting. Granted, in the public pages emails are hidden, so that only the first letter of the domain appears (my address, for example, would appear as "jim.hyslop@l..." One of the moderators pointed out:

About half of the email addresses on the first page start with either an a, h, or y. ... the problem is that when harvesting email addresses you don't need 100% accuracy. Just assume that a's are aol, all b's are bigfoot, all e's are earthlink, all h's are hotmail.com, and all y's are yahoo.com. These letters are going to be [greater than] half the list and you will be correct [greater than] half the time.

We could not come up with any compelling arguments in favour of opening the list. I believe the best summary was:

I'm not sure what the benefits of public membership would be. Arguments such as "I need to know if X is a member of the group" seem empty - this is a *mailing list* after all. To access individuals, you should get hold of them in other ways. If they are active members of the list, you'll still know they're members.

No moderators actually spoke out in favour of opening the list up, so the status quo remains. We moderators are, of course, open to suggestions, and if a reasonably strong argument comes up, then we will re-examine the issue. If anyone feels strongly about it, you can either post your rationale here or email the moderators at boost-users-owner@yahoogroups.com (the 'boost-users-owner' name is a bit misleading - email goes to all moderators, not just to the owner). Similarly, on the topic of polls themselves, the general consensus was that if or when we identify a good reason to run a poll, then we will open up the feature. Until then, there's no reason to change the status quo. -- Jim