...the problem is that the web spiders that search for email addys are exquisitely good at locating the format of one on an open board like UF. When they find an unobsfucated email addy, the spiders target the site for spam, automated account creation, hacking, etc.
On the web, anonymity is difficult at best...everyone's basically hiding in plain sight...but if you do something to draw the attention of the spammers, they will do their best to exploit what they can.
So UF's rule about unobsfucated email addys is more about avoiding any patterns that will draw the attention of the content-mining web crawlers. It's not a horrible infraction, per se, but it's one that they mod here, just to be safe. |
