Hello,This point is highly controversial within the Arch community, I have seen a lot of people argue either side, but I want to share my opinion on this.
Personally I think obfuscation of emails is a complete waste of time, and I am going to explain why.
So lets take my email as an example, polarian@xxxxxxxxxxxx, people often always obfuscate in the same way:
<polarian at polarian dot dev>now what stops a bot from substituting "at" with "@" and "dot" with ".", it is not hard to do, and quite frankly it is a pain to deobfuscate peoples emails within PKGBUILD files when you need to email them to report issues, or get into contact.
I have read a lot of pages on the ArchWiki and they all promote obfuscation of emails, have seen discussions on discussing the pros and cons, and not saying obfuscation has no downsides, but none of the discussions amounted to anything.
Can we please stop advertising obfuscation of emails, it is counter-productive, we have anti-spam measures, and bots can easily bypass the obfuscation unless you make it more sophisticated, but at that point people won't be able to understand the email and you will be uncontactable.
All obfuscation does in my experience, is make it 100x harder for people to report issues, its counter productive in a lot of cases but yet Arch community still advertises.
It is up to you personally if you want to obfuscate your email address in PKGBUILDs and other files, but PLEASE can we stop advertising it as a perfect solution to spam, because in many cases, it doesn't even protect you from spam, just is a hindrance for people who genuinely want to contact you.
Thanks, -- Polarian GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760 Website: https://polarian.dev JID/XMPP: polarian@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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