How do I get some information removed from diswww.mit.edu?

If you're reading this page, you probably got here while trying to remove or change some information that's published via the diswww.mit.edu gateway. (Perhaps I've asked you to read this after you have sent e-mail to <bert@mit.edu> asking me remove or change something.) Here are a few explanations and instructions that will hopefully help you. Please read on.

But why do I have to read this? Just remove it!

You're asking the wrong person.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, back when I was still an undergraduate and the Web was a budding new technology, I wrote the original implementation of diswww for a volunteer student organization at MIT. Some of the people who maintain MIT's computing infrastructure decided that they liked the idea, so they adopted my code, had another (unsung) developer rewrite large portions of it, and run it on one of their servers.

My best guess is that you got my address from the bottom of http://diswww.mit.edu/help.html. That page states: "Originally written by Albert Dvornik <bert@mit.edu>; gateway rewritten and currently maintained by ops@mit.edu.". As this wording hopefully suggests, I no longer have any connection whatsoever with the maintenance of the gateway. The only reason why my name is still there is that someone was nice enough to leave it that way.

Okay, then who is the right person to ask for page removal?

This question is not as simple as you might think.

It is important to understand that diswww is a gateway. It allows users on the Web to get access to a conferencing system called Discuss, which is commonly used at MIT. Some Discuss "meetings" work like bulletin boards; some are set up to archive e-mail from some mailing list. Some meetings are public; some require an MIT-issued browser certificate to access the meeting; and some don't allow Web-based access at all. The access control list for each individual meeting specifies who can access the meeting, who can make comments... and who is allowed to delete posts. This information varies from one meeting to another.

Diswww just takes data from the Discuss meeting and publishes it on the Web, under the guidelines set for that meeting. So, to delete posts from a publicly accessible meeting, you need to figure out who "owns" the meeting, and talk to them.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a good way to find out this information if you are not affiliated with MIT. If you contact the current maintainers of the diswww gateway, by sending e-mail to <ops@mit.edu>, they might be able and willing to help you find the meeting maintainer, who may or may not be willing to delete the post. (The meeting maintainer will probably want to know which specific transaction/post numbers you want deleted.) If that doesn't work, there's not much more I can do.

Sincerely,
Albert

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