Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):
I also restricted access of the list roster to the list admins - to prevent potential abuse (e.g. by spammers).
Uh-oh.
I think we need to talk about that, because I think it's an extremely bad idea, and am delaying un-doing your change pending discussion primarily in the name of the spirit of consultation among admins. I.e., I _do_ expect to revert that change soon, but wish to discuss the matter first.
(In the future, I'd actually respectfully suggest you check with the other admins before making fundamental changes, rather than having us merely react to them retrospectively. I hope you don't take that as any form of personal criticism, as I highly respect you for showing leadership. Very likely, you assumed this was a no-brainer improvement, and I gladly acknowledge your benign intent.)
Making the roster accessible to listadmins only, as opposed to subscribed members, really doesn't help the "I'm hiding my address from spammers" people much, in the first place: Spammers can easily programmatically "harvest" the addresses of anyone who's ever posted, from the back-postings archives. Moreover, the "I'm hiding from spammers" people already have a less-drastic remedy that doesn't injure the transparency of the roster generally: Anyone who's _that_ concerned about his/her address never being seen in public need only set the "hidden" flag on his/her individual subscription.[1]
The harm done by setting the roster listadmin-accessible-only is twofold: (1) It prevents people from seeing whom they're sharing the list with, i.e., whom they're speaking to at the moment -- for no compelling reason whatsoever. I really think this is an important concern, and part of what it means to be a community -- to know _who_ (or at least what e-mail address) is participating with you, other than those who've explicitly hidden their addresses.
(2) Using the listadmin-accessible-only setting creates an implication of hypercontrol and creates the suspicion in the minds of many of us mailing list old-timers that this is yet another forum run by control freaks who like to "disappear" people they dislike while making sure that, lacking access to the roster, they write to their fellow members to protest the action. (You can rightly protest that we're not that sort of admins. The point, however, is that's the impression such settings naturally convey.)
I hope the above analysis doesn't come across as cranky or kneejerk: I've been through this discussion many, many times over a period of decades, and so please accept my apologies in advance if it seems harsh, peremptory, or insufficiently well explained.
[1] People here who are subscribed to the main SVLUG mailing list, whose roster is viewable by any subscribed party, can see the effect of that flag's use at http://lists.svlug.org/lists/roster/svlug . For the benefit of those who aren't, the roster starts out with this header data:
436 Non-digested Members of svlug: 166 Digested Members of svlug: (11 private members not shown) (4 private members not shown) [list follows below that] [list follows below that]
The "11 private members" and "4 private members" are those who've set the "hidden" flag on their individual subscriptions.
The SVLUG list's listinfo page includes this advisory in strong-tagged text, to further warn in advance any I'm-hiding-from-spammers people:
Our public message archives display unobscured posting addresses. If you're trying to hide your e-mail address from spammers, do not post from that address.