DISQUS

Devon · 2 years ago

I don't see anything in the hCard info @ microformats about whether it's wrong to mangle the e-mail address in the tag in any way. But I can't help but think that any spambot could easily scrape whatever's in the @class='email' and then try a few algorithms to figure out what might work and if something can't be done with it then just append it to a file and have a human see if he can read it and then shove it into a database. I don't know, it just seems near impossible since there's a specific defined area to grab.

Roger Kondrat · 2 years ago

Devon,

You make a good point and I totally agree, its like putting a big sign 'harvest me' next to your email.

I have been thinking that it would be nice to have an hCard behind a Captcha style gateway for semi-private information on my site.

Any thoughts?

Julian · 2 years ago

Glad this has been thought about -- this idea just dawned on me this morning when reviewing the implications of microformats myself. Totally agree that, more broadly, the semantic web means your page fundamentally will be available for machine consumption, for better or worse. How to protect the worse seems to be the biggest issue confronting microformats currently.

Daniel Aleksandersen · 2 years ago

Short answer: Yes, definitely.

The only way to prevent spam from destroying the hCard (or uploading vCards to the internet!) is by destroying spam first!

There is a second solution: Make GnuPG signing and encryption mandatory to successfully email people. This would reduce the amount of spam as it would be administratively more difficult to send spam, and it would be more processor intense to send lots and lots of emails.