Friday, April 18, 2003
I made a couple of small adjustments to the tinywords site today.
The main changes have to do with how email addresses are displayed on the site, and were motivated by reading this recent article from the Center for Democracy and Technology: Why Am I Getting All This Spam? This report found that publishing an email address on a Web site resulted in that address receiving a lot of junk email, because spammers are using special programs to collect email addresses from Web pages automatically. The CDT found that you could effectively foil this harvesting process by "obscuring" addresses so that humans can understand them, but software can't easily parse them: name at domain dot com instead of name@domain.com.
Accordingly, I changed the comments system so that email addresses of commenters are now displayed in this obscured format. I also went through the author's database (which supplies the bio on every haiku) and obscured all the email addresses in there.
Other minor changes: Comments have always been sent to the haiku's author, where possible, but previously they were sent with a tinywords dot com address as the return address. Comments now are being sent with the commentator's email address as the return address. This should facilitate conversations between commentators and authors (and should cut down on the number of email messages I have to forward.)
I've also added to the HTML tags you can use to format your comments, allowing strong, em, and blockquote in addition to those already permitted. Want me to allow other codes? Drop me a line and I'll consider it.
Finally, a last-minute reminder: the tinywords contest deadline is today -- 11:59pm Pacific time.
The main changes have to do with how email addresses are displayed on the site, and were motivated by reading this recent article from the Center for Democracy and Technology: Why Am I Getting All This Spam? This report found that publishing an email address on a Web site resulted in that address receiving a lot of junk email, because spammers are using special programs to collect email addresses from Web pages automatically. The CDT found that you could effectively foil this harvesting process by "obscuring" addresses so that humans can understand them, but software can't easily parse them: name at domain dot com instead of name@domain.com.
Accordingly, I changed the comments system so that email addresses of commenters are now displayed in this obscured format. I also went through the author's database (which supplies the bio on every haiku) and obscured all the email addresses in there.
Other minor changes: Comments have always been sent to the haiku's author, where possible, but previously they were sent with a tinywords dot com address as the return address. Comments now are being sent with the commentator's email address as the return address. This should facilitate conversations between commentators and authors (and should cut down on the number of email messages I have to forward.)
I've also added to the HTML tags you can use to format your comments, allowing strong, em, and blockquote in addition to those already permitted. Want me to allow other codes? Drop me a line and I'll consider it.
Finally, a last-minute reminder: the tinywords contest deadline is today -- 11:59pm Pacific time.
