Dear Guus,
We have already recorded JIDs for all members on the website. I
suggest that we add email addresses for people that are interested in
having their contact details published, and think of some kind of
opt-in mechanism.
I support this idea. I want to make it easy for interesting people to
contact me, and it would also be nice to be able to quickly look up the
contact details of other XSF members I want to reach out to. This
information is already available in the membership applications as you
mentioned; this means I can still reach out to them but it's always a
bit of a hunt and it's also not clear whether the members are okay with
being contacted that way or not.
Having an opt-in mechanism would make it clear that communication is
welcome through the provided channel(s)
An implementation of this is in the works at
https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/issues/1572 which contains a mock up
of a possible realisation.
The design looks good. Non-distruptive, but still reasonably available!
By the way, what is members.json and where is it used? Is it what
memberbot relies on?
I think some kind of spam protection as mentioned on the GitHub issue
could be desirable, though not a deal-breaker for me. Some websites ask
the user to solve a CAPTCHA before providing contact details.
Personally, I have a separate public JID to prevent spam on my main one
(another reason an opt-in process would be useful, as it would let
people specify which JID or email ID they want to receive communication
on). As for email, that spam box gets filled up already so it's
something of a lost cause anyway (-:
Best wishes,
Badri
