Tidying up duplicate and old lists

Talks.cam is a self-service website, relying on the goodwill of the community. Anybody is free to create a new list, but we kindly ask that users first check to see if there is an existing list for their college/department/society/group etc to avoid the creation of duplicates.

Nevertheless, sometimes duplicate lists do get created; when we are notified of this then our policy is for the current list manager(s) to nominate which list should be the "real" list, and then we recommend that the remaining duplicate lists are updated as follows: their descriptions are edited to include a link to the "real" list, and their titles renamed to reflect their "archive" status, e.g. a duplicate "Department of Stuff Seminars" could be renamed "Department of Stuff Seminars 2011-2014". To facilitate this when the list managers of old lists are no longer contactable, the Talks.cam Helpdesk will, at their discretion, grant access to those lists to the successors of those list managers.

The reason for doing it this way is two-fold: Talks.cam does not currently have the facility to easily merge lists; and one of the original aims of Talks.cam is to function as an archive of all past talks, therefore we do not usually delete lists.

Similarly, our policy for old lists that are now defunct (and have no current equivalent) is to keep them as an archive and not to delete them; in certain cases we may rename them if necessary to avoid confusion.