[thelist] Angora socks comment on DJC article

[Daniel J. Cody]

Jack Schonchin wrote:

>   It seems the complaint and resulting discussion of
> the complaint has wasted far more collective time than
> if the person who had been annoyed simply read past
> the blurb and continued with his browsing.

My concern, and that of others I think, isn't that we're wasting time
with this issue. The evolt site belongs just as much the person who
brought it up in the first place(ron, who has contributed more than his
share of help over the months) as it does to any other person, so they
have every right to take exception to what appeared on their website.
 
> > What if he had slammed african-americans
> > using the n-epithet?
> 
>   And what if I were a Satanist sacrificing babies in
> the street?  Examples, examples.

It would be even more off topic, and even less usable by anyone visiting
the site - therefore, even more subject to review.

>   You see, the single largest source of spam from is
> having your email address on a web site. It gets
> harvested again and again by automated spam trollers.
> (I mean that in the fishing sense of the word, not
> slashdot trolls). I am aware that this listserv is
> also posted on the web, but I do reduce my exposure
> whenever possible.

We're all aware of where most spam comes from. Recently I changed it so
when a persons profile shows up, their email address is masked with a
%40 - read below for more on that. My profile(
http://evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=9&uid=5 ) shows dcody%40oracular.com
which will get passed over by spam bots due to its lack of a
%string1@$string2 type string.

Further, 'most' spam bots will pull their email address' off search
engine result pages. You see, spammers want to get a list of peoples
email's that fit into a certain demographic, and an easy way to do that
is have a bot search pages that come up in the search results of
something like 'extreme sports', 'gaming', etc.. That way, they can more
than likely get a more specific group of email address to sell to an
advertiser thats trying to sell, in this case at least, to a specific
demographic such as young men 12-18 for example.

At any rate, search engines don't index dynamic pages like those on
evolt.org, so 9 times out of 10 this is a non-issue in the first place.

>   It would be better for all concerned if our listserv
> addresses were not posted on the web site. Instead,
> partially obscure them and only make them fully
> available to listserv members through a login
> procedure (see egroups.com for an excellent example).

Where, exactly, are you seeing any persons email address(joe at foo.com) on
the listserv's website? If you'll notice, every email address that comes
through this list gets masked with the '%40 trick' - replacing the @
sign with %40 - which spam bots won't recognize as an email address, but
your mail client will. Again, a non-issue.
http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20000800/001620.html

At any rate, trying to discuss this with you is what is becoming a waste
of time, and becoming officially off-topic..

<tip type="bash shell output">
The usual redirector symbol > only redirects standard output. However,
if you want to redirect standard error as well, you must use >& - like
this:
make mycoolprogram.c >& /home/djc/mycoolerrors.err
will create a text file with your errors.
</tip>

.djc.