abbreviating email addresses?

[ocicat]

Given that we were sharing BSDForums with a number of spammers, the practice of removing (or at least abbreviating...) email addresses posted publicly was a practical policy attempting to protect people from needless spam.

• It may be worth adding to DaemonForums' policy that publicly posted email addresses is not recommended, & Moderators may remove them without warning.
• Is there any vBulletin add-on which will automatically blank out email domain names similar to words deemed as offensive?

[ai-danno]

And I was a culprit just today... I wasn't thinking... Ocicat's absolutely right, this can definitely be a problem.

[anomie]

Originally Posted by ocicat

Is there any vBulletin add-on which will automatically blank out email domain names similar to words deemed as offensive?

If so, I think the way the NetBSD mailing list archive system handles it is pretty slick.

Example: mail@to.cn becomes mail%to.cn@localhost.

[TerryP]

Other then when it must be validated, I always write E-Mail addresses as user [at] host [dot] something. Which serves quite well when posting e-mail addresses in public view on the web.

Humans know how to deal with it (usually) and it takes a spambot smart enough to harvest it through a regular expression. Otherwise the program will only see regular text that doe not appear to be a user@host.something or an anchor with a mailto: href.

[Carpetsmoker]

I, for one, am not a particular big fan of attempting to "hide" email addresses from spammers, people should just use a proper anti-spam solution (spamassasin, dspam, tmda, etc) instead of attempting to hide their email address from spammers, the effectiveness of this method is questionable, and it makes it difficult to contact people ... Basically is doesn't really solve anything, it's just a poor attempt at fixing a symptom.

This being said, I also realize that many people don't share this view and do want to hide their email address, so publishing other people's email addresses without their content is of course not acceptable.

One non-intrusive way to make an address unharvestable would using writing it in HTML character entities, research done in 2003 shows this works http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml

In any case, I would not be in favor of using automatic intrusive address munging ...

[corey_james]

user [at] host [dot] something <<--- i like this approach

[TerryP]

It's a habit that I picked up the from community on forums.pcbsd.org and the Admin Team on sasclan.org -> where we always think about public view

[FloridaBSD]

IMHO. This forum ought to me made viable only by registered to that point we should also require that you have to log on in order to register just for an extra level of protection againts bots, and while were at it we should also have a dedicated group if members that does nothing but prune answered and solved threads and as always I m more than willing to moderate the linux Forum as i know quite I bit about linux and can always look up stuff iI am not sure about on google Linux or BSd for that matter. Another handy spam prevention method is to require a reference.

[TerryP]

Wouldn't that somewhat injure people STFW and finding things here?

[corey_james]

We would never put ourselves in a situation that would make us invisible to google