Talk:Email address use - Revision history

Halfasspete at 07:42, 15 December 2005

2005-12-15T07:42:05Z

Rfs: /* the risk of doing it that way */

2005-12-10T16:52:14Z

the risk of doing it that way

Rfs: /* the risk of doing it that way */

2005-12-10T16:51:50Z

the risk of doing it that way

Halfasspete at 03:46, 10 December 2005

2005-12-10T03:46:07Z

Halfasspete: the risk of doing it that way

2005-12-10T03:38:16Z

the risk of doing it that way

Rfs at 03:12, 10 December 2005

2005-12-10T03:12:07Z

New page

I think it'd be safe to encourage people to change "foobar@freegeek.org" to "foobar at freegeek dot org" since no information is lost. A basic concept of a wiki is to enocuarage everyone to fix it where possible, not to create more work for the admins. [[User:Rfs|RfS]] 19:12, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:42, 15 December 2005
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	: How about this instead? ''Want to help clean the site up? Then pitch in. If you see an email address you can safely change it to the form of "foo at bar dot com" and post a note to the author of the article asking if they really want to advertise personal information in a public site. Please remember that there are a few public email addresses that are OK to leave intact (info@freegeek.org for instance).'' We admins watch the change logs pretty closely and will note these changes and deal with them. I suspect there'll only be a handful of people putting emails up at any given time. [[User:Rfs\|RfS]]		: How about this instead? ''Want to help clean the site up? Then pitch in. If you see an email address you can safely change it to the form of "foo at bar dot com" and post a note to the author of the article asking if they really want to advertise personal information in a public site. Please remember that there are a few public email addresses that are OK to leave intact (info@freegeek.org for instance).'' We admins watch the change logs pretty closely and will note these changes and deal with them. I suspect there'll only be a handful of people putting emails up at any given time. [[User:Rfs\|RfS]]
		+
		+	::This makes sense to me. I'm pasting your edit into the main page, and I'll go to work on the addresses I found. --[[User:Halfasspete\|Pete]] 23:42, 14 Dec 2005 (PST)

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:52, 10 December 2005
Line 15:		Line 15:

	: How about this instead? ''Want to help clean the site up? Then pitch in. If you see an email address you can safely change it to the form of "foo at bar dot com" and post a note to the author of the article asking if they really want to advertise personal information in a public site. Please remember that there are a few public email addresses that are OK to leave intact (info@freegeek.org for instance).'' We admins watch the change logs pretty closely and will note these changes and deal with them. I suspect there'll only be a handful of people putting emails up at any given time. [[User:Rfs\|RfS]]		: How about this instead? ''Want to help clean the site up? Then pitch in. If you see an email address you can safely change it to the form of "foo at bar dot com" and post a note to the author of the article asking if they really want to advertise personal information in a public site. Please remember that there are a few public email addresses that are OK to leave intact (info@freegeek.org for instance).'' We admins watch the change logs pretty closely and will note these changes and deal with them. I suspect there'll only be a handful of people putting emails up at any given time. [[User:Rfs\|RfS]]
−
−	~~(Please sign your posts with three or four squiggles <nowiki>~~~</nowiki>.)~~

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:51, 10 December 2005
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	Version edited for brevity and relevance by Pete: [[Berkely spam harvest study excerpt]]		Version edited for brevity and relevance by Pete: [[Berkely spam harvest study excerpt]]
		+
		+	: I'm not saying we should encourage people to post emails at all.
		+
		+	: What I'm trying to address is ''If you find a wiki page containing email addresses you don't think should be there, please don't simply delete it, but instead contact one of the Admins.'' I don't see a reason to disempower the new wikiers, and why create the extra work for the admins?
		+
		+	: How about this instead? ''Want to help clean the site up? Then pitch in. If you see an email address you can safely change it to the form of "foo at bar dot com" and post a note to the author of the article asking if they really want to advertise personal information in a public site. Please remember that there are a few public email addresses that are OK to leave intact (info@freegeek.org for instance).'' We admins watch the change logs pretty closely and will note these changes and deal with them. I suspect there'll only be a handful of people putting emails up at any given time. [[User:Rfs\|RfS]]
		+
		+	(Please sign your posts with three or four squiggles <nowiki>~~~</nowiki>.)

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 == the risk of doing it that way ==
-<p>
+I agree, ease-of-use and utility are of very high importance. But how effective would that rule be? A study at Berkeley determined that it's not hard for "spambots" to crack codes like this. (I don't know if it's possible to determine how widespread this technique is.) <br><br>
-'''3. Obscure email addresses'''<br>
+So I still think it's a bad idea for people to put more than the occasional email address in, even obscured like that. I think using a wiki page as an email list ought to be discouraged, since there are better tools out there.--[[User:Halfasspete|Pete]] 19:38, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)<br><br>
-<p>
+Here is a [http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Winter2003/feat.spamharvest.html Berkeley spam harvest study].<br>
-*webmaster -at- yourhost dot berkeley dot edu
+Version edited for brevity and relevance by Pete: [[Berkely spam harvest study excerpt]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:38, 10 December 2005
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	I think it'd be safe to encourage people to change "foobar@freegeek.org" to "foobar at freegeek dot org" since no information is lost. A basic concept of a wiki is to enocuarage everyone to fix it where possible, not to create more work for the admins. [[User:Rfs\|RfS]] 19:12, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)		I think it'd be safe to encourage people to change "foobar@freegeek.org" to "foobar at freegeek dot org" since no information is lost. A basic concept of a wiki is to enocuarage everyone to fix it where possible, not to create more work for the admins. [[User:Rfs\|RfS]] 19:12, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)
		+
		+	== the risk of doing it that way ==
		+
		+	<p>
		+	I agree, ease-of-use and utility are of very high importance. But how effective would that rule be? (See one study's analysis, heavily edited for relevance to our discussion, below.) I still think it's a bad idea for people to put more than the occasional email address in, even obscured like that. --[[User:Halfasspete\|Pete]] 19:38, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)<br>
		+	Following is from a [http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Winter2003/feat.spamharvest.html Berkeley spam harvest study].
		+	</p>
		+
		+	'''3. Obscure email addresses'''<br>
		+	<p>
		+	"Obscuring" addresses — by rewriting them in various ways — '''doesn't offer nearly the degree of protection''' against harvesting tools as the more effective methods discussed above. The alternatives of using JavaScript...and offering...contact forms...are both far more effective... On the other hand, obscuring addresses is often much simpler, as this approach typically does not require any programming.
		+	</p>
		+	<p>
		+	The following are four techniques that you can use to "obscure" email addresses on your web pages:
		+	</p>
		+	'''3.2. "Munge" email addresses'''
		+	<p>
		+	Address "munging" typically consists of substituting words for symbols in the domain name parts of email addresses — "at" (or variations thereof) for the "at sign" and "dot" or "period" for the periods, and the like — as well as adding whitespace between each part of the address. Sometimes extraneous text is also added to the address, which a human reader would ostensibly know to remove.
		+	</p>
		+	<p>
		+	Using this technique, webmaster@yourhost.berkeley.edu could be munged as:<br>
		+
		+	*webmaster -at- yourhost dot berkeley dot edu
		+
		+	or perhaps:
		+
		+	*webmaster -at- NOSPAM yourhost dot berkeley dot edu
		+	</p>
		+	<p>
		+	''Benefits.'' This technique is also likely to foil simple-minded harvesting tools.
		+	</p>
		+	<p>
		+	''Drawbacks.'' This technique places burdens on your site's visitors to understand how to "unmunge" your email addresses [...]
		+	</p>
		+	<p>
		+	Finally, sophisticated harvesting programs with pattern matching capabilities may still be able to retrieve a fairly high percentage of the addresses trivially obscured in this manner.</p>