Personal email addresses in posts

There was a post just now with a personal email in it for contact obfuscated in a very simplistic way, like ‘u s e r at s o m e d o m a i n.com’. Bots are very capable of decoding this sort of thing nowadays, so it is a security risk.

The Jackrail is indexed by crawlers for search engines, but it also then allows bots to trawl the site. This is an implication of making the site open, as was requested by a few users.

So for your own protection please don’t put your email in posts, even in forms you think machines can’t read - they can. The problem is of course that addresses get harvested for spam and other nasty purposes.

To communicate your private email to somebody if necessary, simply use the PM function in the Discourse web interface.

Posts with personal emails of yourself or others will be deleted or edited, as it is very important that bots do not register The Jackrail as a source of valid email addresses.

Andrew