"Wolfgang Schwanke" wrote in message
...
Opinions differ. There are privacy issues involved. Does profiling ring
a bell?

Privacy issues in a public forum?

Right.

Would you want e.g. a future employer of yours be able to
search through years of your usenet history and form an opinion on your
personality, interests, political leanings etc. based on it?

Why shouldn't they? Inasmuch as a person does express those things
publicly, why should they be concerned that an employer (for example) might
learn about them from that public forum? IMHO, a person who is concerned
someone might get a negative impression ought not to MAKE a negative
impression.

Including
all those posts you did while in a bad temper, drunk, or confused?

If those posts occurred often enough that they would actually make up a
significant portion of an employer's impression, then they would be a
legitimate contributor to that impression. And why not? If a person is
constantly in a bad temper, drunk, or confused, an employer would probably
want to know about that.

Again...don't want to make a bad impression? Then don't make a bad
impression.

Of
course you could stop posting at all, but that's no fun. x-no-archive
is a good way out of this dilemma.

I'm not ready to say there is simply no justification for x-no-archive.
There may well be one that I don't see right now.

But as far as the "I don't want people to judge me" aspect, that's just BS.
First of all, you can always post anonymously. Secondly, if a person isn't
willing to live with their public behavior, they need to rethink their
public behavior. Telling the rest of the public to "just ignore what I
said" is a pretty cowardly way out, showing a lack of good character.

Frankly, if I were an employer checking Usenet as part of a job interview or
review or whatever (and I'd have to be an employer with a LOT of time on my
hands to justify that...the idea that an employer might do this seems, in
and of itself, pretty paranoid to me), if I saw a person who was using
x-no-archive, I'd just form my opinion based on the two or three weeks
available on my ISP (or Google, or whatever). Furthermore, the use of
x-no-archive would reflect poorly on the person. On top of all of that,
what if those two or three weeks just happen to be the weeks that person was
having trouble (bad temper, drunk, confused, whatever)? They've just shot
themselves in the foot, because there's no history beyond that to
counter-act the recent poor behavior.

If you don't want to be profiled, you need to stay off Usenet completely.
There's always SOME context for someone to profile you, if you are posting
here.

I don't think other people have any
right to complain. All posters should have absolute control on what
gets archived about them, and their decision is no business of others.

Baloney. For those that are concerned, I suppose it's nice that Google (and
other archives?) respect the x-no-archive field. But there's nothing
forcing anyone to respect that field, and no person who posts something to a
public forum like Usenet has any right or expectation that their post won't
live on forever in someone's archive.

You got one thing right: there's no "decision" per se, so no..."their
decision" isn't any business of others, being non-existent. You can't
"decide" for someone else what they will do.

The USENET
archives are great search tools and the x-archive crap attempts to
defeat
that...

If the OP hadn't posted at all, it also wouldn't be archived. So what
is lost?

As far as I know, the scenarios being discussed here are using x-no-archive
and not using x-no-archive. How does the "hadn't posted at all" come into
play? The OP had a question...they would have had a pretty tough time
getting it answered here without posting it.

The answers (of those who don't x-no-archive) will be
searchable anyway.

The answers may not make a lot of sense without the original post.

Now, granted, Usenet users are almost all clueless about proper etiquette
anyway and insist on quoting the previous post in its entirety (usually
top-posting too). But a) one probably shouldn't count on it, and b) that
behavior completely negates the x-no-archive field anyway.

However you look at it, x-no-archive just makes no sense, not for the idea
of protecting one's reputation or anything like that. I can't see getting
my shorts in a twist over someone using it, but neither can I see any
serious argument for a person using it as a standard practice while posting
to Usenet.

Pete