Hey all. A few weeks back I proposed putting some archived messages up on a page as part of Mark Reda's "Winter Project Page". There was concern that spiders or spammers might slurp up email addresses and spam the list--a very real fear.
Someone put forth a robots.txt file to keep spiders from sweeping the web site, and someone else proposed passwd protecting it. I think passwds are kind of prohibitive and more work to maintain and distribute. I would still do the robots.txt file, but I also came up with another possible solution that might make everyone feel more comfortable. I wrote a perl script to replace all email addresses in a web page (.html file) with an empty string "". Then I ran it on all the pages in the list archive I've been playing with. All the links still work, but there are no email addresses anywhere in the files that a spammer could possibly grab. The downside is that someone looking at the archive will not be able to email the original poster directly. The other downside is that people who don't have a complete From: field (seems to only be aol addresses so far) get their name, which was just an email address, wiped off the index pages. Check out what I mean: http://members.home.net/vwbrd/a2/ Thoughts? Brian 1989 Jetta GLi Wolfsburg 16v -- The 21st century begins on January 1, 2001. _____________ List Sponsor: http://www.netsville.com To remove yourself from this list, send mail to [email protected] with 'unsubscribe a2_16v' in the body of your message See us on the web at http://www.a2-16v.com Visit the 16V Homepage at http://www.gti16v.org
