[tex-live] Catalogue sources

CTAN maintainer Jim Hefferon ftpmaint at alan.smcvt.edu
Sat Aug 29 01:47:59 CEST 2009


> Are you concerned about spam bots getting a bunch a fresh email
> addresses from the Catalogue sources? AFAIK, the bots don't crawl SVN
> repos yet...

We've been here a long time (well, anyway, Rainer has) and hope to still
be here some time in the future.  :-)

> Actually, the CTAN itself holds quite a lot of email addresses and
> personal information, mostly in plain text or other easily readable
> format. Is there really much more information in the Catalogue sources
> than is publicly available on the CTAN (including of course the HTML
> versions of the Catalogue) or elsewhere on the web? Is this
> information more sensitive that what is usually available from other
> similar projects (informations form CPAN or bugtrackers etc)?

I like "the CTAN".  I may swipe that.  :-)

I can't speak for the other CTAN folks but if an author sends me, say, a
README with an email address then I don't mail them back to tell them I
think they should omit it.

The difference with the Catalogue, to my mind, is that *we* author it.

I have had authors fill in the upload email field with a bogus address
and then I tracked them down, and they expressed concern about spam--
they are afraid that the announcement will contain their address.  A
person may well consider that concern overblown (I do) but it is
different to my mind for them to expose the address than it is for us to
do that.

Jim


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