Last modified: 2013-01-03 02:47:14 UTC
Wiki users are worried about spam when they use mailto: links, particularly as Wikimedia wikis are so well indexed by search engines and so readily available on the Internet. So people have come up with methods of obfuscating e-mail addresses, but these solutions all kind of suck. Examples: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:@ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:No_spam The problem with these obfuscation methods is that they kill any link altogether and they disrupt copy and paste ability. This sucks. I think this general usability problem needs more focus, so I'm filing a bug. There are various solutions possible here: * rely on a distinction in the parsing of mailto: links in a page based on user status; e.g., you could only auto-link the mailto: links if the user is autoconfirmed, otherwise, output (obfuscated) plaintext * auto-link e-mail addresses or strings that look like e-mail addresses and ignore the spam problem (the "don't let the terrorists win" option, essentially) * introduce some kind of {{#mailto:}} parser function that can vary behavior based on user logged-in status (similar to what's described in bullet one) Probably some other solutions can be thought of as well. Basically, it'd be nice if the links actually worked. And if the current obfuscation methods are just getting in the way of legitimate users and not doing anything to stop bad bots and scripts, that should be improved as well.
Change parsing for everyone seems a bad idea, not all wikis are like ours. A parser function in core seems excessive too. We probably would use an extension which provides a way to obfuscate email behind some JS and/or captcha, like many websites and CMS (doesn't one exist?). The wikitext will always be there, though.
