Protect Your Email Address

[Toy Ranch]

This is a public forum, which means that it's viewable by non-members and will be indexed by search engines and also, unfortunately, we'll have some less friendly visitors as well.  Search engines use web bots and spiders to log and index websites before adding to their searches.   

Here's a little about them from Wikipedia:

Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human editor alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey.

OK, that sounds all fine and good, but have a look at this Wiki entry on web spidering:

A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms (Kobayashi and Takeda, 2000).

This process is called web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

Any member who elects to make their email address public via their control panel opens it up to having it harvested by spammers.  If you type your email address into a post here, it will be harvested by spammers. 
They use the same bots and spiders the search engines use, and as soon as the searches start finding us, the spammers will be close on their heels.  When setting up the forum, we took some steps to try and safeguard emai addressed posted on the site, however they don't seem to be working yet.  Please use great care when posting your email address or any personal information you don't want to be searchable.

[Grape]

Hey! On my profile settings I've checked the box to hide my e-mail address BUT it's still revealed to the world. Anybody else have this situation?

[roheimiana]

I'm also in the same situation – the box is checked but the email address is showing. Perhaps this is because we're viewing our own profiles and these include all the information we entered when we registered, even though the address is not visible to others. Could you clarify, Bobby?

[Toy Ranch]

When you look at your email address, you can see it, but when anyone else looks at it, it says:

Email:  hidden 






Hi Clubhouse!