Bug#166028: clicker to hide e-mail addresses

[Josip Rodin <joy@gkvk.hr>]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 01:09:34PM -0600, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> > > A robots.txt might tell e-mail harvesters to exclude the script that
> > > generates e-mail addresses.
> >
> > IMHO, a robot that is doing something as antisocial as trawling for
> > e-mail addresses is not likely to be heeding a robots.txt file.
> 
> I don't think it'll eliminate harvesting, but it might help reduce it. A
> robots.txt on the archives would be nearly worthless, but one on a script
> would be more likely to work. E-mail harvesting on scripts can be risky.
> If you read a history on robots.txt you'll see many examples that show if
> a harvester or crawler does not heed the robots.txt they can reek havoc
> on some scripts and get caught in endless loops. I don't see this kind of
> thing happening now, so it leads me to believe that even antisocial
> "trawlers" don't tend to run scripts listed in robots.txt.

Well, actually, I've seen viewcvs/cvsweb get crawled on several occasions,
and getting obscenely long URLs after a while. They also gave up after a
while.

The whole spam business can hardly be stopped by non-forceful restrictions.
Heck, I'd bet that a better part of the email addresses in those lists they
sell are randomly generated, since I watch 0asd897234@... get double-bounced
on my mail hosts all the time.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.