Re: Spam: process the web archives?
On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 10:49:20AM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 03:15:53PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > The best compromise I can think of, both for list and bug archives, is
> > to display obfuscated addresses unless the user is authenticated
> > somehow. I can understand people not wanting to have to log in just to
> > view the archives (c.f. loony setups where you have to create an account
> > and log in just to report a bug), but what if unauthenticated users got
> > everything except unobfuscated addresses, and if you did some simple
> > cookie-based login it was all just as before?
>
> I often find mailing list archives tedious to use, because they seem to
> be annoyingly slow.
>
> I think being required to log in will make the pages uncachable by
> squid, which in turn will only make the problem worse.
>
> Other then that, I am not sure if it would help. There are that many
> people accessing the mailing list, it would be pretty hard to check each
> one one registering that they don't plan to use it for sending SPAM...
Yeah, in mentally composing a reply to Santiago's post on -vote I
managed to convince myself that it was a pointless idea. After all, all
it takes is one e-mail harvester and the effort is useless, even if you
think obfuscating bugs is worthwhile and non-infuriating in the first
place: it doesn't make a significant difference whether they get your
e-mail address once or twenty times.
Discussions about obfuscation usually seem to me to be attempting to
ring-fence the wrong part of the system. They hide in a small,
flimsily-barricaded fort rather than developing better armour
(filtering) or fighting back (abuse reporting).
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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