I've been with DVInfo.net since practically the very beginning. The e-mail address I use here, though, receives virtually no SPAM.

My other e-mail addresses... in particular, Hotmail and Yahoo, get tons of SPAM. Also, one other address I have that I use for things like "registrations" to sites, etc. gets so much SPAM that I have to turn it off from time to time.

Bottom line is...heed what Chris and Ken say. You're safe here.

The Law of Large Numbers and Law of Averages would indicate that since I have the most posts, I would also have the most spam. My posts would more likely be present and sampled by the bots harvesting email addresses. This simply is not the case. I rarely get spam at my public email address.

Chris wrote "It's practically impossible to farm email accounts from dvinfo."

In 60 seconds I did the following:

-- copied the contents of this page, just prior to posting this message, from Internet Explorer into Word;

-- in Word, right-clicked the email button in the Jeff's message above to edit the Hyperlink;

-- copied that URL into another instance of Internet Explorer, resulting in the display of the email page with Jeff's address showing as a live link;

-- repeated the process above on the email link page; and

-- harvested Jeff's email address manually.

It took me longer to write this post than it did to snag the email address.

I used Word merely as a convenience. But if I can do it with Word, any spider can follow the links and get the same result. The only way to eliminate the problem while still displaying a properly formatted email address is to render the text to a graphic and display that. As long as the links are live, there is a vulnerability. Here's the general rule -- if you can follow live links and see a result that is text, so can a spider.

What vBulletin does do is disable the View Source command on IE's menu. That gives a certain appearance of security but, as my Word example shows, it is only appearance. Had I used an HTML editor instead of Word, I could have seen the full source of the page without problem.

It is possible that vBulletin or the server protect themselves by other means, such as blocking access to known programs or non-registered users. I agree with the other posters here -- I cannot trace any spam to this forum.

<<<-- Originally posted by Will Fastie : Here's the general rule -- if you can follow live links and see a result that is text, so can a spider.
-->>>

Well that's not ALWAYS true. There are a lot of things humans can do on a page that a spider cannot, or has difficulty with. For example, sometimes something as simple as searching through a page based on the URL querystring (if you look up at your URL box, everything after the '?' is a 'querystring'). The querystring tells the php template what to display from the database - this page doesn't actually exist as a page - it is simply dynamically generated from the logic in the php page.

Spiders have great difficulty with querystrings. Even the most powerful spider systems, such as those used by Google, have problems with trying to snatch content out of dynamic database-driven pages. It's something that's very bothersome when dealing with Search Engine Optimization, but it's of great benefit when dealing with spam bots.

Will:

<< It is possible that vBulletin or the server protect themselves by other means, such as blocking access to known programs or non-registered users. >>

Suffice to say, there are indeed other means at work.

<< I agree with the other posters here -- I cannot trace any spam to this forum. >>

And this is what I consider to be the most important aspect of this discussion. Thanks,

If you're really worried about it, simply open up a new freebie e-mail account for these types of things. That's the easiest solution.

Not here it doesn't. IE5.5/Win.

I have never received spam via my e-mail account here. Wish that were true of my other e-mail accounts!!!

P.S. If anyone should want to know, I am not looking for a date, viagra, or interested in helping someone get millions from their government in Africa...