Talk:Email address use

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. RfS 19:12, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)

the risk of doing it that way

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.)

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.--Pete 19:38, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)

Here is a Berkeley spam harvest study.

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. 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. --Pete 23:42, 14 Dec 2005 (PST)