The new Rietveld archive is working well, but I just had a VIAGRA spam addressed to the list - hope it was just a coincidence. And I have had the following correspondence about the hidden variables that would allow email addresses to be recovered from the WWW archive, which some of us are worried about. Seems like we have to live with it. Alan.
>Thanks Jeff. I can understand you want to keep the "Reply" option, >but since you must use a perl or PHP script why not simply >encode the hidden variables "user" and "host" and then decode >them again when people hit "Reply" ? Alan. > >At 03:59 25/02/2004, Jeff Breidenbach wrote: >> >>I encourage you to ask these sorts of questions on the "gossip" >>mailing list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) otherwise there is risk of the question >>getting buried in my personal inbox. Questions to "gossip" can be >>fielded by multiple people, and this is a matter of general interest. >> >>The short answer is no. So far, the reply facility has been more >>beneficial than troublesome overall. Amongst other measures, we >>monitor the spambot situation through trap addresses and use rate >>limits as a final guard against mass harvesting. While a dedicated >>spambot could cause trouble, I am not aware of any such incidents so >>far. In general I try not to yield usability ground of archives unless >>spammers make it absolutely necessary. >> >>Let me know if you have further questions or comments. >> >>Cheers, >>Jeff >> >>================ >> >>Hello, I administer a mailing list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) that I was >>asked to archive on your server. Your anti-spamming policy looks good, >>but it would be fairly easy to write a script to reconstruct email >>addresses from the hidden variables "user" and "host" that you use for >>replies. >> >>Is there any way to suppress the mail-archive reply facility ? Since >>these are mailing lists and your server is an archive not a bulletin >>board, I'm not sure that you should encourage people to reply outside >>the mailing list anyway. >> >>Otherwise, thanks for the initiative in setting up and maintaining >>this service. Alan. Alan Hewat, ILL Grenoble, FRANCE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> fax (33) 4.76.20.76.48 (33) 4.76.20.72.13 (.26 Mme Guillermet) http://www.ill.fr/dif/AlanHewat.htm ___________________________________________________________
