Some concerns have been raised about the pending transfer of the archive of messages from Canie to myself, what might happen to them, and whether they will be protected.

The fact is, those archives have been public for years. Anyone who visits this website has access to them whether they are registered to post or not. Even people who have been banned in the past can still access any message posted here.

ANYONE at ANYTIME has for YEARS had the opportunity to copy any of the contents of this website to their hard drive, including those archives. There is even software made for that express purpose. Such software generically goes by many names: site ripper, web crawler, download manager.

As such, anyone who has ever posted on the earthwaves.org forum should not have done so with the expectation that what they say is truly private in any way. It's a publicly accessible forum. (this regardless of the message at the top of the main forum page regarding copyright and privacy)

The subject of privacy on the internet is a topic all to it's own, and I've considered posting about that as well, for everyone's education. I think some folks may find they have had a naive concept of how easy it is to find information about you online, all through legal and public sources. I admit it gives me the willies at times.

Anyway, I am not going to change the status of these messages when they pass into my care. There has already been some effort to protect them from search engine bots such as Google, through the use of the internet standard robots.txt file. Some posters desire this in order to keep their posting activities from being easily searchable. I will continue to use this.

As I've already mentioned, I do plan a few behind the scene changes to the forum to help make it work better. One of those changes is intended to increase board security. I will let folks know about this work as it happens, but obviously this won't happen until after the new year.

If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to bring them up.

Brian