Hello,
Recently, I found an user sharing his email address on his About section. It appeared as a human-friendly mailto link.
The downside of this is spam bots can easily collect it.
Could OGS help these unaware users and could OGS help a bit in making spam bots’job slightly more difficult ?
It could be just a little advice below the textarea like “Be careful, don’t share private information (phone number, address, email address, …or do it at your own risks” something like that.
It could also be (both implementations are not exclusive) replacing every @ by a png when an email pattern is spotted.
But, other protection could be using CSS pseudo-classes for displaying the full email address.
Of course, there are probably plenty of technical workarounds and OGS developers will know the best way to implement it if they decide to address that issue.
I don’t really see that point as crucial but just in case small efforts can also improve that concern, I don’t want to restrain myself from raising the topic.
Arnaud
2 Likes
hi,
I don’t know what to think whether profiles should be private rather than public. And I don’t even see crucial the feature of letting the user choose between public and private visibility.
But, what I’m convinced of is that any case, users should be told to care about their personal data.
Arnaud
1 Like
Considering the barrier to entry is pretty minimal - literally just filling out a form - I don’t think that you really have a leg to stand on to claim that it being exposed publicly is the real issue. This is the internet, you should always assume anything you’re posting is public unless explicitly directed otherwise. Even then, it’s the internet, so you should take that with more than a few grains of salt.
2 Likes
OGS doesn’t seem to publish the email addresses associated with an account, however, if a user voluntarily fills out the “About” section of their profile with an email address, that tells me that they want their email address to be public. Personally, I maintain multiple email addresses for various uses. I frequently publish my main email address in public forums. I let my spam filters do the work of keeping the bulk of junk from my eyes and sort through the rest on my own. I get as much mail as I do on that account because I willingly put my email address out there. That’s on me. I’m not sure why we’d expect a profile on a public game server to be private. It’s not the same use-model as Facebook and other social media where we want control over which posts our grandmothers and employers see.
Ultimately, I think, just don’t share what you don’t want public. Within the context of OGS the only privacy to be assumed is in private games and private messages, and that only so long as our correspondents and opponents don’t publish our comments. Everything else seems to be public and I personally don’t see a problem with that.
If you want to be private it’s easy enough to create a new email address and start a private player account, though I should probably add that having multiple accounts is against the terms of service for many sites. At a glance I didn’t see it mentioned on the OGS TOS, but at any rate the only way it’d really be a problem and get you in trouble is if you are sock puppeting to inflate/deflate your rank, or to impersonate or harass other users.
2 Likes
This post that you just wrote… did you know that it is publicly available to anyone with an internet connection? You don’t even have to have a forum account!
I suddenly realize… we are all horribly exposed!!
Hello,
To all: take it easy, it’s just forums for the users of a game server… It’s just enough to warn users.
Information shared in this place usually should not raise privacy concern, should they?
Arnaud
