Enjoy Our Community, But Protect Your Email Address

I wanted to post a quick blog entry on a subject that I should have commented on long ago. In the process of exchanging ideas and helpful attachments, many of our community members are posting their email addresses in the community forum in the body of their posts.....really bad idea.

By posting your email address in body of a community forum post, you're virtually assured of it being harvested by a SPAM bot. Now, you may ask, "Why isn't Cheresources.com protecting my email address?" We take significant steps to protect our members data. When you complete your online profile, the email address that you provide can be hidden from other members in "My Settings". You can choose to receive community notifications via email or via private messenger when you visit the community. Here's the big difference: Even if you don't hide your email address from other members, ONLY MEMBERS can find your email address on your online profile. It's virtually impossible for an automated bot to register as a member of our community and perform a mass harvest of our member's email addresses. Believe it or not, when you do see SPAM on our forums (something that we've gotten our hands around pretty well over the years), it's an actual human being with nothing more productive to do....which really makes me sad :(

However, if you post your email address in the body of a forum posting, it can easily be harvested by SPAM bots. So, if you need to send a file to a member (but don't want to post it on the forum for all members), simply visit their profile by clicking on their name and find their email address there or send them a private message (PM) and use the full editor which will allow you to attach files to the PM. Remember that only registered members of the community can download attachments and post topics, but anyone can view the text posted in the forum.

In the future, if there is enough interest, we can make arrangements to set up a fully private forum section where only members granted permission by myself can converse and exchange information that may be of a more sensitive nature. We'd likely keep such a forum limited to what I'd consider "Power Users" in our community with an established track record of quality community interactions.

Our community is growing fast and it's really exciting. The new features that we continue to introduce are really helping to draw our community members closer to one another and there's more to come!