On 10/01/23 at 11:03pm, Polarian wrote:
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.
If it is simple enough for a bot/script to do it, where is the hurdle for a human? It's pretty evident to me how to parse that as a valid email address, and no real effort to type it into a mail to: form.
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.
100x harder? How? Because it isn't a clickable mailto link? Please give Arch users *some* credit. We aren't imbeciles; we can work out how to email a maintainer whether their address is obfuscated or not.
And it you are going to keep emailing these lists, please learn how to quote replies so the context remains in the thread. That is a practicethat actually does make interacting with the community less burdensome.
-- // jwr
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