Forums General Discussion Email addresses on forum

Would some kind admin developer please modify the forum so that email addresses shown in our profile are properly munged with html entities, or masked from spammers in some other way.

Thankyou!

If you don't want your e-mail address available via the forums, then edit your profile, and delete the entry that has the e-mail address to be displayed in the forums. There is a separate entry for an e-mail address that the forum administrators can use to contact you, if necessary, but this address is only available to you, when modifying your profile, and to the forum administration.

I want my email displayed so that real people can contact me, but it makes sense for this to be masked to automated spam bots. This is a very common practice on the web nowadays.

Why not just mask it yourself when you type it in? Or ask people to use the private message function of the board?

The most common methods of obfuscating e-mail adresses are completely trivial to defeat. I wouldn't be surprised if all those people who've posted their e-mail addresses as blah[at]whatever.com and think they're so clever aren't all getting a ton of spam in their inboxes every day. Spammers aren't idiots. There's enough money in spamming to make it worth their while to write the tiny bit of code it takes to break the most common obfuscation techniques.

There are enough possible variations on html-entity encoding techniques to at least make it more difficult for bots. Munging techniques I've used on my websites recently have been very effective.

I don't see the problem in incorporating this technology into the board to maximise functionality.. I shouldn't really have to make my own workarounds. I want to use email, not the private message function. The public email field is provided therefore it should be provided fully with all the functionality that an email field nowadays entails.

I'm just asking for a feature I think is relevant to this day and age.. not for suggestions on how to get around its absence. I can handle that part myself.

I think your request would be more appropriately addressed to the creators/developers of the forum rather that to the end users .. http://www.ubbcentral.com/

Not really.
If you take a look at Tjerk's profile you will understand what Tomalak16 wants.
It was avilable for Tjerk as an admin. But for me and others. No.

I can't believe you didn't put a link in.. Tjerk won't show up in search results, and the urls for profiles are number based

Hehe you can use the User List. Tjerk's just written in "tjerk at mirc dot com" which is entirely not what I mean. I mean for the emails to be stored properly in the database and then rendered with a combination of HTML entities, or even with a graphic. This is the semanticlly prefered behaviour.

Perhaps I should suggest it to UBB but it's a pretty simple modification to make in the meantime whilst waiting between versions. I just don't understand why it can't be implemented.

...Krejt would show up in search results, and he has a sticky thread posted at the top of this forum which you could click on too.

I'm not aware that you can't do the same as he has done for your own profiles.

I was searching for Tjerk.. heh. Hard to spot that one.



I just don't understand why a workaround should just be settled on. That's all he's done... but like someone said in this thread, his method of masking is easily avoidable. Scripted methods like html entity munging and image generation are relatively easy to do and 100 times more effective.

Yet the only suggestions people have are to use other communications media, or to make do with existing manual methods of masking.

I guess I'm a little disappointed that the attitude isn't more positive and collaborative when this forum displays thousands of unmasked email addresses for spammers to pick up!

"Just don't elect to show your email then." But I want to, and no reason I should have to choose between spammers and progress.

*sigh*

Hey I didn't say I was against it, I just choose not to involve myself with it because I don't care either way, and my experience is that IRCers can turn even the slightest suggestion or comment into a fully blown political pile of crap.

I suggest you email tjerk at mirc dot com with your suggestion.

Haha OK....

Why not put a small image in your signature with the email address on it?

Why not have the board software do it for me?
Computers are supposed to make lives easier.

That'd be a good idea too; have the board generate the image and put it where the text would be now.

That's the sort of thing I was hoping for. This is more a request for progress than for my own personal use.

like stated before: make that a feature request for the people that made the forum software... nothing can be done about it from this side.

I disagree; it's the slight alteration of approximately one line of PHP. :P

For what it's worth, it *would* be a good idea to request it for UBBthreads. Nothing like attacking a problem from both ends, though.

Why not have the board software do it for me?
Computers are supposed to make lives easier.

Easier for who? If a modification like that is made by webmasters instead of the software authors then the webmaster has to remake the modifications each time the software is upgraded - hardly a fair or reasonable request.

There's nothing wrong with your suggestion but it should only go to the authors of the forum application, as was suggested before. That said, I am not convinced that the amount of spam you receive suddenly dropped by your own implementation of the suggestion you made. By the time you got around to that your email address would be in hundreds of databases and any time you click on opt-out links in the spam simply adds you to more.

Only solution is a new email address and improved management of how it is advertised to people.

For what it's worth, it *would* be a good idea to request it for UBBthreads. Nothing like attacking a problem from both ends, though.

BZZZZZZZ.

Go straight to the top. It's more efficient and there are fewer breakdowns in communication.