POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : BIG Newsgroup Spam Problem : BIG Newsgroup Spam Problem Server Time
31 Jul 2024 16:18:10 EDT (-0400)
  BIG Newsgroup Spam Problem  
From: Sven Littkowski
Date: 19 Nov 2006 10:45:22
Message: <45607c12@news.povray.org>
Hi everyone.

Since many months I recognize a big security problem with the POV-Ray 
newsgroups, and decided to talk about, in order to have that big security 
problem fixed.

Anyone who is posting a thread here, is also automatically adding his e-mail 
address to his/her thread. It would be fine if the e-mail address could be 
altered by some server-side script (PHP or whatever) in order to prevent 
that e-mail search engines of spammers can mis-use the e-mail addresses the 
threads contain.

I am getting each month more than 1,000 (!) spam e-mails since I am posting 
here! Not only caused by this website, but among other newsgroups websites I 
am participating. But most alter the e-mail address of a participant to 
something e-mail search engines cannot identify anymore as e-mail address.

An example: Such a server-side PHP script could use
str_replace("@","[]",$Posting)
and
str_replace(".","[]",$Posting)
to make the e-mail addresses unusable for those spammers. Such a modified 
e-mail address would then look like that:
"Sven[]yahoo[]com"

Of course, this is just a simple example. Other variants are possible. A 
human can always correct the e-mail address if (s)he desires to send a 
message directly to a person who posted here.

Greetings,

Sven


Post a reply to this message

Copyright 2003-2023 Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd.