Tom Neff wrote:
>--On Wednesday, October 11, 2000 11:41 AM -0800 Steve Summit
><scs@eskimo.com> wrote:
>> Not to start any arguments, but just as a data point: if you
>> want feedback from me on a web page, you'd better provide an
>> e-mail address somewhere.
>
> Another data point: for many web pages, the feedback you get from
> people willing to use your form is feedback enough.
Point. (But I wasn't talking about feedback I get, but rather
feedback someone else is or isn't likely to get from me. Me,
I don't seem to get that much feedback in any case, other than
all the unsolicited questions I get from people who assume I have
nothing better to do than their homework. And that, for me, is
actually a more pressing reason for contemplating the suppression
of my e-mail address on a web page.)
> Inviting spam just to satisfy a few purists may be a bad bargain.
No, *I'm* the purist. I have this stubborn belief that the
Internet is a tool to enable communication, and that e-mail is
one of the most efficient and convenient communication mechanisms
there is, and I refuse to respond to the spammers by hamstringing
myself (and everybody else) by making e-mail less useful.
My feeling is that if we have to do that, it means that the
spammers have won, and succeeded in destroying the net. If we
reach that point, what we ought to do is not cripple ourselves
further or put up with them any longer, but rather abandon the
broken net and go build a better one, that has more immunity to
parasites. (And there are indeed days I think we ought to do
just that, but that's a topic for another day, and probably
another list.)
Steve Summit
scs@eskimo.com
-- Programming Challenge #6: Don't just fix the bug. See http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/challenge/.************************************************************* To unsubscribe send a message to majordomo@faqs.org as
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