Hi Mehil,
Why Oh why is the default on new membership to MAKE EMAIL ADDRESSES PUBLIC!!!
What was the designer thinking.
Never ever ever, given the global problem caused by spammers, should you need to actively opt out of effectively broadcasting yourself as fresh meat to the spam industry. I’m sorry but this is totally irresponsible. To say that I am deeply dissappointed would be a sizable understatement.
That profile has been deleted, the ability to remove the email address was either not available or buried somewhere, leaving the fastest option as deletion. I only hope that I managed to do so before any damage was done.
Whenever I become a member of an online community the first thing I do, is go to the profile settings and make the changes I think are necessary.
I agree with you that the e-mail setting should default to “hidden”, but I really don’t see any reason to get mad over it. My guess is that it probably took longer to write your message than the time needed to change your e-mail preference.
ufa is right , you shouldn’t have to opt out of that .
lets say the comodo-forum has 100.000 members, does it still take
more time to write the above post than for those 100.000 to change the settings ?
also, remember that many people are not aware of the risk of spammers
obtaining their email addy from boards. Many places it’s considered good netiquette
to warn people who post their email addy publicly about the risks and mods will edit it away …
The forums are not made / designed by Comodo, so it is unfair to pin the blame on them. It is a Simple Machines Forum, so any comments / complaints should go to them in the majority of cases.
It is easy to change your settings under the profile button should you ever wish to do so.
All: Ufa is correct, this option is not checked by default in the SMF forum software during new member registration. Nor is there an administrative option for us to force check it for new users, unfortunately. (In fact, the only option that we admins have is to “Allow users to hide their email”, which we have enabled, naturally.)
Apologies for this. And, although Mike is correct in that the forums are neither designed nor coded by us (just configured and maintained), we’ll still investigate and see if we can change this via some SMF patch or even programmatically.
As a side note, however, pls note that in order to prevent/reduce email harvesting on this site, we have added the at sign as a banned word (represented by @ ) to fool auto-harvesters as an additional user precaution.
My general rule when signing up to forums is to provide as little information as possible and if they require it, give my spam email address and obviously false names
IE. My suggestions when sites say to HAVEto give your REAL name are:
I am of firm belief that most forum forms are not SSL secured and as such personnel info should not be entered, i also watch out for tick boxes that detail privacy options.
Unfortunately the internet in general is User beware, so you HAVE to be careful.
Some say it if illegal to do the above, unless you are applying for something really important IE. Tax, Financial stuff then the best response is “NA” or “Not needed” or “This is against my privacy policy”.
The above information is not meant to encourage users to be deceptive but to remind people that on the internet, every aspect of your life is worth money, from what you buy to your Credit number to your name to your email address. Unless someone is paying me BIG $$$$ for this information it is NONE of their business.