On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 09:48:58PM -0500, Jimmy Hess wrote:
E-mail address harvesters (where you get bombarded with direct-emailed crap if you dare post a message to USENET).
Insignificant: email address harvesting activity, in toto, on Usenet, is tiny compared to that conducted elsewhere. (A few moments' thought will suggest why.)
The advantage 'forum sites' have is, you don't reveal your e-mail address to the public when posting.
That's a bug, not a feature. And "forum sites" lack the far more important features that I enumerated in another message in this thread.
And automated spam sending can be mitigated through the use of CAPTCHAs.
Captchas have been quite, quite thoroughly beaten for some time. ---rsk p.s. Before anyone says "but *my* captchas appear to be working", let me suggest this exchange as guidance: "Londo, they could've killed me!" "Nonsense, you are not important enough to kill."