Right now on FreewayTalk, if you post a live e-mail address in the body of your message, it gets filtered to appear as email@hidden on the Web view. The actual e-mail address is stored in the database along with the rest of your message, and anyway is sent out in the clear to all of the mail subscribers to the list.
Tim Plumb has proposed that we filter Web addresses from message bodies in a different way. (And this is actually quite a practical thing: lots of cases exist of clients finding their own site mentioned in Google searches of the public Web view of this list, and often not understanding the reference, or worse, not enjoying being slagged in public for a lack of wit.)
The way this would work is pretty simple. The filter would look for anything that looked like a URL, and unless you were logged in, replace it with web.address.hidden or something like that. Logged-in Web users would not see anything different – just the URL as written in the original message.
So I am asking would anyone mind if the same treatment happened for e-mail addresses? Your address would only be shown if you chose to make it part of the body of a message to the list, so this wouldn’t immediately open up everyone’s address to the rest of the group unless you took that step.
I won’t take any steps on this unless I hear an overwhelming majority of response, so light it up!
Well, we already do that, I was asking (to put it as nakedly as possible) do you trust your fellow list members? Right now, the e-mail subscribers see everything, unfiltered. No way to do other, as we are just subscribing the Web view to the same mailing list as everyone else, and the mailing list sees everything in the clear.
Public, unauthenticated views of the list are crawled seemingly every five minutes by Google, and preserved in their cache for a very long time. It’s those views that are already elided. But at the moment, the signed in Web users don’t see e-mail addresses either. So I am asking if anyone would mind if I removed that protection.
Walter
On Aug 21, 2012, at 11:51 AM, chuckamuck wrote:
Why not try and make life difficult for the truly malicious out there? Seems like a sensible thing to do to me. I vote yes.
So to clarify - the proposal is that URLs and email addresses are only visible to the online community if they are logged in as opposed to the current scenario whereby email addresses are obscured by default.
I would be happy with that as my view is that if you are not happy posting a URL or email address then you dont have to do it. But this way you are limiting the potential ‘viewers’ to logged in members of the FW community.
Right. Everyone can see the rest of the message, just not the e-mail addresses or Web addresses.
Walter
On Aug 21, 2012, at 4:05 PM, DeltaDave wrote:
So to clarify - the proposal is that URLs and email addresses are only visible to the online community if they are logged in as opposed to the current scenario whereby email addresses are obscured by default.
I would be happy with that as my view is that if you are not happy posting a URL or email address then you dont have to do it. But this way you are limiting the potential ‘viewers’ to logged in members of the FW community.
Walter,
I am not a regular here. But I love to read and learn from others questions and subsequent responses. I do think the email show/hide is a reasonable solution. Especially since it is the user choice to include or not an address.
Correct. The way to think about this is that the Web view is “subscribed” to the same mailing list that you are. The public Web view (what Google and any non-member sees) is where this filtering would take place. We are leveling the playing field even further between Mail subscribers and Web subscribers, in other words.
Walter
On Aug 21, 2012, at 11:45 PM, Harshbarger Frank wrote:
Just an after question:
I get my messages delivered as I suppose many do, to email.
I expect that viewing would not change with URL’s visible…
Frank H.
On Aug 21, 2012, at 8:42 PM, Harshbarger Frank email@hidden wrote:
Yes from I
Frank H.
On Aug 21, 2012, at 8:51 AM, chuckamuck email@hidden wrote:
Why not try and make life difficult for the truly malicious out there? Seems like a sensible thing to do to me. I vote yes.