[Discuss] Increased Spam

[pw]

John Blomfield wrote:
> I have noticed an increase in the amount of spam over the last two 
> months and so out of curiosity I googled my name.  The result was the 
> VLUG site and my name and email address.  However, before composing this 
> email this morning I again googled my name and it was nowhere on the any 
> of the first few pages.
> My concern is that having member's email addresses on a public site 
> allows web crawling software to easily increase the bad guy's spam 
> lists.  But I am mystified over the sudden disappearance of my reference 
> on Google.  However I still think this is still a concern and would 
> propose that members email addresses should only be visible on the 
> Discuss email lists and not on the public sections of the VLUG website.  
> Is it possible to use the sort of software used by many Linux forums 
> that hide individual's names and addresses but still send notification 
> of incoming emails to members.
> 
> Any views?
> 
> John Blomfield

Hello,

I mentioned this a couple years ago as a possible spam problem for
people. I thought it had been looked into already but the mail server
has been rebuilt (???) since so maybe the fix has been removed.

The VLUG membership web page also has links which can show peoples
email addresses. ie: http://www.vlug.org/cgi-bin/vlug/members.cgi

I suggest that if email addresses are to be presented
a PHP or perl script be used to present an image of the address rather
than html text. This would weed out spam bot email address harvesters.

Peter