Forum:Hide Emails from Guests

Question

[bioinformatics2020]

I find this strange that Biostars does this. Guests are able to see portions of our emails (first letter and website.) I would argue NOBODY should have access to this (besides moderators and administrators), but at the very least, can we please make this hidden to guests. There is no reasonable answer as to why guests and bots should even see this.

[Ram]

In the meantime, I'd recommend you change your username so it's not easy to guess your email address.

[bioinformatics2020]

Luckily, my username isn't the same as my email address!

[Ram]

You're all set then. In any case, there'd need to be biostars-specific bots to deduce email address from two separate HTML elements. Either that or actual humans picking out email addresses to spam. In my experience, it's usually recruiters that get in touch with me through biostars. I think once or twice, a user on the site contacted me directly, but I've not had trouble from spammers.

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

This is done solely to help people remember the email they used to sign up.

That was the only rationale. If people feel very strongly about it we can turn that feature off, not a big deal.

[bioinformatics2020]

Thanks for the reply Istvan and explaining the rationale!