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

[Jeff Gentry]

On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Seth Falcon wrote:
> Agreed.  I'm not sure how obsfucated things have to be in order to
> avoid being harvested for spam.

Me either.  Clearly a lot further then one would like. :)

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

It is definitely more readable, but something just bugs me when I look at
obfuscated emails.  I tend to agree w/ Robert's comment that it might be a
good idea to just not include them.  In the day & age where everyone
'googles' everyone else it doesn't seem terribly difficult if they really
don't want to look inside the package.  Of course, ideally the emails
would be there in cleartext but apparently the terrorists have won.

> 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.

Yeah - I saw this about a year ago when someone asked me to do up a web
page like theirs & I saw the funky javascript.  I tracked down the website
for the software and it did seem pretty clever, there were various levels
of pre-obfuscation you could use (as apparently some spam harvesters can
parse normal coded text) and IIRC it could even spit out images.  The idea
of using images makes me cringe (particularly since I'm someone who often
uses 'lynx') but again, apparently the terrorists have already won.

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

I thoguht that the angle brackets were required for the maintainer field?