Re: Hiding email addresses from spammers on https://nm.debian.org/nmlist.php

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, 02 Aug 2007, Don Armstrong wrote:

>> Frankly, the non-incidental cost of breaking all mailto: links and all
>> possibility of copying and pasting far outweighs the possible benifits
>> of blocking non-intelligent e-mail harvesting programs. [Not to mention
>> that address munging breaks bodies of messages and signatures.]

> You don't need to break the mailto: links, you can simply replace by a
> http:// link without the email and have a mechanism (captcha or
> whatever) to get access to the real email...

> It's more complicated to implement and it's a bit heavy but we don't
> copy-paste emails from public archives that often so that it's a major
> nuisance for us.

I'll repeat what I said the last time that this came up: I'm not a big fan
of doing anything along these lines, but I guess I don't care a tremendous
amount if someone implements this on an opt-in basis for people who just
absolutely have to have their address munged.  It does mean, however, that
I'll not feel any obligation to jump through whatever hoops it takes to
reply to the person who submitted the bug.

However, I *strongly* object to any change that would munge, hide, put
behind captcha, or otherwise make it difficult for people to see *my*
e-mail address on the bugs that I report or on the packages that I
maintain.  Please do *not* protect my e-mail address in some well-meaning
but misguided desire to help me with my spam.  I already have tools that
do that, and I do not want anyone to put any hurdles whatsoever in the way
of people being able to contact me about any of my Debian work.

> And Steffen is not alone with this point of view. Ryan Murray would also
> like us to be more serious about that topic for example.

Not meaning to nit-pick wording choice here, but I'm completely serious
about this topic.  People aren't opposing address munging or hiding just
because they don't really care or are lazy.

> We're getting off-topic for -newmaint though. Please take it to -project
> if you reply to my mail. :)

Done.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>