These forums post your e-mail address and invite spam!!!!!

That is really bad. I tried the "Change Nickname" link. All that did
was subscribe me to the entire group AND add my nickname to my e-mail
address.

I would want to be notified when someone replies to a topic that I
star, but not all groups. The only ones who would want that are
Moderators, Administrators, and those who like to troubleshoot.

As for the e-mail address, that should never be visible. Google surely
knows how effective modern spiders are at finding things like e-mail
addresses on webpages. Spammers use those exact same spiders to search
the web. They especially love NNTP newsgroups. Perhaps this forum is
not visible to a NNTP reader, but if it is, your e-mail addresses are
EXTREMELY vernable.

Being able to reply to the poster rather than the board can be handy,
but it would be better to have a Private Message system like most
forums have. Ironically, Google already uses such software for its
Google Earth BBS.

EMAIL REMOVED wrote:
> That is really bad. I tried the "Change Nickname" link. All that did
> was subscribe me to the entire group AND add my nickname to my e-mail
> address.
>
> I would want to be notified when someone replies to a topic that I
> star, but not all groups. The only ones who would want that are
> Moderators, Administrators, and those who like to troubleshoot.
>
> As for the e-mail address, that should never be visible. Google surely
> knows how effective modern spiders are at finding things like e-mail
> addresses on webpages. Spammers use those exact same spiders to search
> the web. They especially love NNTP newsgroups. Perhaps this forum is
> not visible to a NNTP reader, but if it is, your e-mail addresses are
> EXTREMELY vernable.
>
> Being able to reply to the poster rather than the board can be handy,
> but it would be better to have a Private Message system like most
> forums have. Ironically, Google already uses such software for its
> Google Earth BBS.

As far as I know email addresses can't be gathered from this forum with
spiders and this forum is not aggregated to news servers so people
can't see the email addresses using newsreaders. In Google Groups you
can send email messages (private messages) by clicking "show options",
"Reply to Author". Spiders can't find out email addresses on Google
Groups web pages, because Google uses captcha pages asking to write the
text on pictures before people can see the whole email addresses.

Reply to Author is just an e-mail.

how about the fact that i cant even see your full email address?? and
it loks like Tomi Hasa found a way to get rid of the email display...
and i also think you miss the point... spammers do not go reading
forums looking for email addreses... they build spiders and bots to
gather them from RSS feeds and the like.... anywhere that they can get
a huge list of emails with minimal effort

EMAIL REMOVED wrote:
> Reply to Author is just an e-mail.

With "email messages (private messages)" I meant email messages are a
bit like private messages. In other words they are the next best thing,
or for me they are the better thing, because I like email messages more
than private messages (or the irritating instant messages).