h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

[email protected]

It has now though, hasn't it

2legs will be gutted

Of course GD, now that you've posted the address on a website you'll be geting all sorts of interesting email... spam I think it's called

Duh. You could always add a certain number, and not tell us

What you're forgetting Gosho is that the threads are dynamically created in response to a request. Therefore they are not searchable by a bot, as the thread doesn't exist until it is requested.

What that means is that each individual post exists only in a database. The information that is included with the post is time stamp; which post it is in reply to; which thread it is related to; the identity of poster; and whether it is the last posting in the thread. (There's a few other bits and bobs included as well, but that's not important.)

Thus whenever the database recieves a request to look at a posting it calls up all the details of the post, and from that constructs the thread based upon the parameters of the request.

I *think* I understand you...

I never thought of it that way - the conversations don't exist as permanent web pages the way that entries and U pages do. So theoretically iy's relatively safe to post an email address in a thread in normal format. It can be abused by real people involved in the thread but not searched for by bots. Great. Super.

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I've often posted my [email protected] address in conversations and have never got a single spam from a robot. But an address I published on a normal permanent web-page gets about 50 spams a day.

How would you know if an email was from a robot?

It's a mass mailing, designed to be sent to hundreds of recipients. About the only level of customisation of the message is that it might say "Ireland" in it somewhere because my personal e-mail ends in .ie

Usually such mailings are advertising Rolex watches, Viagra and dating sites, but occasionally they offer me millions of pounds if I will just give them my bank details.

The address lists for mass mailings such as these are made by trawling the web for anything that looks like an e-mail address. But they don't appear to trawl through h2g2 conversations.

So why did the site keep crashing a few years ago? Jim had to stop them searching the conversations because these spiders were preventing people from using the site!

Ah yes, that's the reason why. The web crawlers are the programs/robots that search through the web looking for all sorts of stuff, including e-mail addresses and indexable content. Jim added a tag to the top of each conversation page which says to the robots "please ignore me", so they go elsewhere. But there would be nothing to stop an uncscrupulous robot from looking on the conversation pages even if that tag was there.