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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes think that people don't really give much thought to some of the things that they do where they simply copy what others do.

My own personal pet peeve is people, on HN, who obscure their gmail address so that it can't be slurped by bots.

I mean why not just use a dedicated gmail account, just for HN, rather than "use my hn handle at that email service that everyone else uses generally". The dedicated account has spam protection and you can forward mail to your primary account as a filter if you want.

I have a couple of web forms with no spam protection at all. The amount of bots that I get isn't so great that I need to trouble people to figure out a captcha. Much less a really difficult one.

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>why not just use a dedicated gmail account, just for HN, rather than "use my hn handle at that email service that everyone else uses generally". The dedicated account has spam protection and you can forward mail to your primary account as a filter if you want.

Because starting, configuring, and checking ANOTHER gmail address takes more time and effort than obscuring my current dev-related email address to be human parse-able only. Seems like a strange thing to have a pet-peeve about, as it could only barely affect your ability to get in touch with these people. Unless, you've been trying to slurp email addresses from HN profiles... I could see it being bothersome in that case.

"and checking ANOTHER gmail address"

If you forward it it's not another account to check though. Sure you have to set it up.

Also, obscuring it doesn't prevent someone who has written to you having a situation where your email ends up in the wrong hands (for sure you've received, if you don't have spam protection, those emails where someone who has emailed you has had some virus which gets all their email contacts, right?)

If you setup a dedicated gmail you can periodically change that as well "refresh" using your own email you can't do that.

To be sure though the pet peeve is really more just thinking that people are being overly hygienic about protecting their email address I guess. You are right that it's not a huge burden on someone who is sending you an email.

When I used to post my gmail account to my HN profile gmail caught all the spam it wasn't a problem (maybe this was for a year or year and a half that it was in the profile..)

Why don't you include your gmail into your HN profile anymore?

Does it mean you don't want us to contact you?

I'll concede, I'm a little under-protected when it comes to spam in my email, and sectioning my usage out to different emails would probably be a very big improvement upon that.

Still, this ought be more a pet-peeve for myself. I can't see how obscuring my email would bother you, except perhaps in the line of thought that you think it does NOTHING to avoid spam, and I am just wasting a tiny amount of everyone's time by having them parse it while not benefiting personally. I figured if there was ever a profile a geek would write a scraper for, HN would probably be it. It was a single line of defense I saw others use, and adopted.

Appreciate the conversation. The mostly undiscussed behavior of email format preference in HN profiles is something that has always strangely held my attention; I consider myself a geek for micro-behaviors in this and most any community though.

I run a site which provides an API for real-time testing of spam vs. ok submissions for blog comments, forum posts, and contact-forms.

I handle about 250,000 submissions a day.

Contact-forms can easily be overwhelmed with spam, it's just a matter of how lucky you are, or not.

"it's just a matter of how lucky you are, or not"

Any factors that you have been able to determine that quantifies why someone is lucky or not?

I suspect the submission of spam correlates to your traffic, more than anything else.

I have some sites with a "contact me" form which get hammered, and others that get one or two hits a month.

(Adding simple captchas, or hidden fields, etc, can work at the low end. The ones that get hammered though have bots/people that deal with that.)

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