[seqfan] Re: Email addresses Was: offset of A000254 wrong?

Hagen von Eitzen math at von-eitzen.de
Tue Aug 4 21:01:42 CEST 2009


Leroy Quet schrieb:
> I personally would love to have my email address given on the EIS instead of my homepage, but there seemed to be some spam bots that can understand the "(AT)" in our email addresses. However,... my email address (with "(AT)") does occur in numerous newer sequences of mine in the EIS. And I have NOT been getting much spam lately at all. So, either yahoo now has better spam blocking in place, or the spam bots that can understand the "(AT)" have moved on (but they may return later).
>
> This has been discussed much in the past, but maybe we need an image, say, for the @ symbol in our email addresses instead of "(AT)", or have some other method of hiding our email addresses from spam bots. (Maybe representing each entire email address as an image? Or maybe a text-based prove-you-are-human challenge before revealing email addresses to OEIS users.)
>   
Alas, all these methods are problematic.
For example "@" as image cannot be displayed to braille displays or 
screen readers (unless there is the corresponing ALT text - and bots 
will find that).
Todays bots are smart enough to interprete javascript and CSS based 
hiding of scramble text while at the same time a human user might still 
be presented the scramble e.g. if they have disabled javascript.
Anything that qualifies as non-disturbing to a human user using any more 
or less standard browser will be harvestable by bots (and be it by 
OCRing a rendered page) and anything non-harvestable will annoy at least 
*some* users.
For example even I (and I'm not a bot!) sometimes need a second try with 
capture protected pages...

Hagen





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