Stop the Spam to FTers email addresses
 

The email address I use on FT I don't use anywhere else. Thus, I would have hoped it would stay spam-free.

Unfortunately, and suddenly, I am getting an increasing deluge of spam. A few last week, 8 yesterday and 14 today! At this rate, my FT email address will be totally unusable within a week.

I did a search on google for <my email address> and find 4 matches, all of them on flyertalk.com!

Hey, guys, get a ****ing clue! DO NOT ALLOW SEARCH ENGINES TO INDEX FLYERTALK CONTACT DETAILS! There is no way references to "www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttravel_forumcgi/ Ultimate.cgi" should be appearing in search engines, because if you're allowing Google to do it, you're no doubt allowing spammers to do it too. It just means that, in the end, we will all have our email accounts flooded with spam and/or have to not put email addresses on here.

(Edited to remove my email address, in case this page gets indexed somewhere too.)


[This message has been edited by Kremmen (edited 06-10-2003).]

We'll check it out...

UPDATE: I modified our robots.txt file to hopefully keep the polite bots out of the Ultimate.cgi and ubbmisc.cgi pages, which display email addresses.

You can always keep your email address private by choosing that option in your Profile page. If someone needs to get hold of you, you can post your email address as "user at domain dot com", ala slashdot.

[This message has been edited by dan at WebFlyer (edited 06-10-2003).]

Blame the software. Because every single page (including the personal info page) is essentially a flat file, it's quite easy for search engines and bots to search it. So if you want it changed, InfoPop is the one that has to do it.

Unfortunately, the email address field in the profile gets a new password set to it if it's changed. I'm assuming this means it has to be formatted properly. If we make our profile email address invisible to others, there is nowhere else in the profile to put the "user at domain dot com" version that isn't intrusive. (... basically, the sig and interests which print on every single post are the only free text fields available.)

Well many of us have received Spam via FT addresses, but the jury seems to say FT'ers are more likely behind it than any robots:


http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum97/HTML/000738.html

That is exactly what Dan means. If you do not wish your email to be available do not make the valid email address publicly available. That means giving your email in an altered form in the signature field or in the body of a message. You are correct in believing that you must give a valid email address to the UBB system itself.

Well behaved bots will obey the directives in the robots instruction file that Dan created -- however as you must know spammers do not really care about being well behaved.

I do wish my email address to be publicly available, just not to spammers and not splashed all over my messages, since that's messy and wasteful.

There should be a public email field on this system which isn't used by the system, just displayed to users. This would solve all these problems, including being able to have a different email publicly shown than the one the system uses for account verification.

Yeah, that would be a nice feature; I've seen it on other software. Unfortunately, that isn't a feature with our UBB. It may be something that can be coded in when we have the time for it, but not in the immediate future.