: Team

: I receieved the following spam this morning to my E-mail that was harvested
: from this site or from a bot on someone's system. So, to remind everyone
: all about spam and my aversion to it, Look at the bullshit I received
: following this.
: Posting images to this site or any site form your computer is a big opening
: for others into your system. Consider this!
: Robert...about yahoo AGAIN.

: ****

This raises an interesting issue... The first time I posted to this discussion group I thought the "Your E-Mail Address" field was mandatory and so I filled it in - I was hesitant though, because its just too easy these days for someone to point a bot or spider program at a discussion group (and its archives) and collect thousands of valid email addresses.

I'd noticed on some other sites that they're set up to automatically change a users email address into something like jobsmith_at_hisdomain_dot_com or something like that... this way other users still see the email address and can send personalized emails, but at least there's some hindrance to spiders/bots.

so... I'm wondering if its too difficult to change the Email Address field's properties to accept addresses in a form other than joesmith@hisdomain.com ?Right now it disregards an address if its not in the usual format) This way users can enter their email address with some kind of unique but still humanly readable syntax, which is harder for bots/spiders to harvest.

Mind you, if thats too hard to do, one can always leave the Email address field empty and give their email in the body of the post...

Just my 2 cents,
Joubin
(joubin2000_at_yahoo_dot_com)