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

[Joerg Arndt]

* Raff, Paul <praff at math.rutgers.edu> [Aug 05. 2009 10:00]:
> If we're forward-looking and thinking about the upcoming wiki, what about
> having email addresses inside a reCAPTCHA, for those that are concerned
> about them getting scraped?
> 
> You can look on my website for an example, in case you don't know what a
> reCAPTCHA is:
> 
> http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~praff/

Tried and worked.

Then searched for your email adr and found it,
e.g. in some pdf docs on your site  8-)
Neatly finds all kinds of (AT) (DOT) etc. obfuscations.

You'll some thermonuclear trickery to fix this (google):
 Results 1 - 10 of about 4,160 for (YOUR EMAIL)
(OK, only the first few actually are your email)

> 
> It would be more burdensome for the person trying to find the email address,
> I agree, but not so much as to prevent the user from abandoning his/her
> effort to get it.
> 

Spammers embed the captcha in a page that promises
interesting material of some kind,
visitor decodes captcha, and indeed get promised material.
Spammer has your mail adr.
All fully automated.


> 
> [paul]
> 
> Paul Raff
> Graduate Assistant - Monitoring Message Streams
> Rutgers University
> http://math.rutgers.edu/~praff
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 5:00 PM, David Wilson <dwilson at gambitcomm.com> wrote:
> 
> > I think if you want clickable mail addresses, you are dead in the water,
> > since anything you can mail to, a bot can uncover.
> >
> > On the other hand, if we had some special code, like inserting a random
> > first and last letter to the user name (e.g, joecool at comcast.net becomes
> > mjoecooly at comcast.net). The munged address is easy enough to revert for
> > those in the know, but to a bot it would appear like a well-formed
> > address. Just a thought.
> >
> > On the evil side...
> >
> > Embed large numbers of randomly generated bogus email addresses in
> > invisible areas of each OEIS page. When bots hit the site, they will
> > think they've found the mother of all mailing lists.
> >

Too many ==> too obvious.
Make that dependend on amount of content.