Oplink PR Ping

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 28 January 2015 at 04:17:12 UTC, Jonathan Marler 
wrote:
> Just had a thought.  You could expose the email addresses only 
> for users that are logged in.  That way the evil robots won't 
> be able to steal the email addresses but real people can still 
> access them easily.  However, maybe it is meant to be difficult 
> by design? in which case nevermind :)

Registration on the forum is currently very simple because it 
grants no additional privileges. Half of the spam that we had was 
coming from registered accounts, so it's not likely to be a 
considerable deterrent.

I have thought about (and even implemented, but never enabled) 
adding a link which allows getting a user's email address after 
solving a CAPTCHA challenge.

I am hesitant to enable this, because:

- The reCAPTCHA MailHide API documentation has been quietly 
removed from Google's website.
- The email hiding feature on Google Code now no longer allows 
solving a CAPTCHA to get an email address.

Something tells me that in spam economics, a working email 
address is worth much more than the cost of solving a CAPTCHA.

Of course, in our case, it would be easy to harvest everyone's 
email from the NNTP server. But most spammers don't know that.