And of those that do, is it a link immediately following the by text in the HTML code or is it done via some scripting or something other that plain vanilla HTML?
While I have no doubt it could effectively harvest a number of addresses, I believe the work involved would make it difficult.
I just looked at the page source for a random /. entry, something a spider might be able to read, and the current board. While both have 'by $username', they appear to be a bit different in the actual spacing and linkification used, which makes it harder for a simple bot to quickly scam a username. I am not saying it can't be done, just that I suspect most spammers don't want to waste the time trying to harvest addresses from forums when they can use a dictionary (like they do today). |
