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It's to fool primitive scrapers looking for e-mail addresses with the @ symbol. It's handled like that on the entire KIT website.

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This can't be it because on mouseover I get the mailto: link with the @ symbol in it.

Contradictions like that are common. A popular example:

* Failed login: I can't tell you if the username/email or password was wrong, since that'd reveal if the the user exists

* Failed signup attempt with existing username/email: Cannot create an account, because a user with that username/email already exists

Hello. I see you're trying to log into some shitty website that somehow survived 20 years of changing internet. Probably you don't even know what email you used for registration, but there's a chance that some variation of your "all-websites password" will work. Maybe. The catch though is that you have 5 tries, after that your IP gets banned.

Don't shit your pants. The IP ban doesn't actually work.

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