[Bioc-devel] Updated biocViews beta available: please comment

[Seth Falcon]

On  6 Dec 2005, jgentry at jimmy.harvard.edu wrote:
> Looks very nice.  The one comment I have is that when you go to the
> individual package pages
> (e.g. http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/bioc/1.8/html/sscore.html),
> the email portions of the Author/Maintainer field look absolutely
> terrible (IMO) due to the anti-spam obfuscation, to the extent that
> (again IMO) they probably shouldn't even be put in there if they're
> going to be that gibberishy.

Agreed.  I'm not sure how obsfucated things have to be in order to
avoid being harvested for spam.

An alternative is now available, your opinion still welcome :-)

> This reminds me of a system I did see at one point, in use at
> www.zincfingers.org.  Relooking at their source it seems they're
> using something called "Spam Vaccine".  IIRC it uses a mangled name
> that then gets passed to a javascript applet to transpose it to
> plaintext on display such that spambots won't see the actual email.
> Don't know how well it works though.

It looks like they code the email address using "&#CODE;" and then
have a java script to parse that.  This is clever.  I don't know if
this is any more or less effective --- at this level of effort, I
wonder about creating png's.

But if folks are satisfied with attempt #2, I'm also happy to leave it
at that :-)

One issue: our mangling recognizes addresses of the form:

   <something at place.tld>

Email address that aren't specified with angle brackets won't be found
and will appear as-is.

+ seth