Why did Mods delete my email address/phone number/postal address?

If you are reading this you may have had a post in which you included an email address, phone number or postal address moderated by deleting those details.

The Mods do this because the Forum is continually visited by bots which harvest such details for spam marketing lists or identity theft. These bots are ubiquitous on the Internet and can’t be locked out if the Forum is to remain readable by non-members. It was something of an eye opener for me to see how much of the daily traffic was probably attributable to such bots.

Roon staff already have access to the email associated with a Roon account. If you need to provide an email, phone number or address to staff or other users, the preferable way to do it is to use a PM or Private Message. Click on someone’s avatar and you will see the option.

If you see someone openly posting such details, please flag it under “Other” for the Mods so we can save the poor poster from death by spam.

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Just a note that reporting emails in screenshots isn’t really necessary. Web crawlers harvest text, not writing in images (yet …).

Incidentally, this is the format Jussi uses if you really want to use an email address in a public post but want to be safe(r) from spam:

‘contact support [a] signalyst [.] com’

No need to report email addresses in that or similar form.

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