Ask HN: Why do HN users still obscure their e-mail addresses?

Re:Ask HN: Why do HN users still obscure their e-mail addres... by kylec on Sunday September 30, 2012 @09:04PM (#4594845)

I agree. I asked about this a while ago on Super User:

http://superuser.com/questions/235937/does-e-mail-address-ob...

The top answer links to a study done a few years ago that showed that revealing your email in plain text did result in increased spam, but I don't think the study went into how effectively that spam was handled by modern spam filters.

In my own person experience, I've had my email address on my HN profile, Twitter page, personal website, Stack Exchange profiles, etc for years without any problem. I do get the occasional rare piece of spam but I think that it's more than offset by providing a no-nonsense way for people to contact me.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do HN users still obscure their e-mail addres... by FaceKicker on Sunday September 30, 2012 @10:23PM (#4595021)

Regardless of the effectiveness of spam filters (unless they are literally perfect - 100% precision and 100% recall), doing something like the "Building with Javascript" method seems strictly better than doing nothing based on the linked study - it reduces spam by 99.3% and adds no work for humans who want to email you. Except for humans who have JS disabled by default, I guess...

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Re:Ask HN: Why do HN users still obscure their e-mail addres... by nickknw on Sunday September 30, 2012 @11:07PM (#4595127)

That's exactly why I use a combination method on my personal website[0].

By default it uses the JS method for a clickable link, but if someone doesn't have JS enabled it degrades to "Email: nick at this domain (For a clickable link, turn on javascript)".

It relies on the assumption that 'someone not using javascript' == 'someone computer-savvy enough to figure out what that means', but for the people that are likely to be reading my site, I think that's a pretty safe assumption to make.

[0] - http://nickknowlson.com/contact/

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Re:Ask HN: Why do HN users still obscure their e-mail addres... by weinzierl on Monday October 01, 2012 @06:44AM (#4596175)

'someone not using javascript' == 'someone computer-savvy enough to figure out what that means' || crawler

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Re:Ask HN: Why do HN users still obscure their e-mail addres... by nickknw on Thursday October 04, 2012 @08:57PM (#4615208)

Are you saying:

'someone not using javascript' == ('someone computer-savvy enough to figure out what that means' || crawler)?

If so, yes that's the point. I don't want to give crawlers my email address.

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