HN Explorer

Request HN: Please all update contact info in your profile

78 points by ashishb4u ↗ HN
Hi All. This is just a thought. Many a times we run into discussions which are not useful to the HN community in general, and sometimes we run into people of networking/general interest. Maybe we can carry on the conservations & networking in private and keep HN clean!

Please mention your contact info in the "about" section of the profile. The email field is not visible in public. Be sure to be smart when entering email id to prevent spams!

39 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 84.6 ms ] thread
jf
Where is your contact info?
ashishb4u
Sorry, Updated. I had an impression that the email field would reflect in my profile info.
csomar
I still don't see anything. Does changing about box needs time to update?
tbrownaw
It's there now, so I guess it does (caching proxy maybe)?
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mrduncan
Reminder: The email field is only visible to mods, not other users. If you want your email to be visible to other users, add it to your "about".
teej
I highly recommend adding your email to your profile. I get emails from HNer's sparsely (about once a month) and they're always detailed, specific, and respectful of my time.
mahmud
Best think I have done in my entire internet life is using my real name on HN (a first for this anonymous privacy hawk!) and leaving my contacts.

You folks have been the best! Great face to face meetings too.

nethergoat
I wish I had the same foresight you did - my one regret about signing up for HN is not using my real name as my username.

It would be great if pg added the ability to change one's username, but given the HN community's usual sentiment on feature requests (a sentiment I share), I'm not holding my breath.

w1ntermute
You might want to obfuscate it though. No need to unnecessarily add to the mountain of spam that you already have to wade through because of the surprisingly large number of false positives in Gmail's Spam folder. I have even had SVN commit notifications end up in my Spam folder, even though I have rules in place to tag them! You'd think they would put any emails that I have tag rules for on a whitelist.
joshfinnie
Since this is about your "About" section of the profile, I have to ask: Why are the links you add to your profile not clickable to people who view it? Is it because of spam? Or some other reason? I just found this always interesting to me.
mcav
Probably due to spam, but I wish PG would just add links with rel=nofollow instead.
jbooth
Eh, rel=nofollow is kinda like those car stereos that won't play unless you put in a code. Doesn't stop people from ripping them off, they'll just figure out it's useless later.
huhtenberg
Just put a minimum karma requirement in for links in the profile to be clickable.
mcav
Yeah, but we want to avoid search engines from following the links, not humans. Search engines respect nofollow.
jbooth
And humans, or human-coded robots for that matter who are ignorant of nofollow will still post all kinds of blogspam, thinking it's effective.
ryanelkins
I've found this to be very helpful - I've received more than a few emails through my HN profile from people interested in what I am working on - often from people who did not publicly comment on anything I was doing at all.

There have also been time when I've wanted to contact people and couldn't.

michaelkeenan
Please also add your location if you're comfortable sharing that.
ErrantX
Put your blog/site/projects in there too. I like to browse the profiles of people making interesting comments to see what they are up to.
MicahWedemeyer
Or to see if someone making a strong statement has any experience whatsoever to back it up.
staunch
HN should have some very basic private messaging, like Reddit has had since the very early days.
fizx
To more easily implement, might I suggest the anonymized email approach a la Craigslist, with some karma floor for sending.
oscardelben
I'm not sure how Reddit does, but how would you deal with spam?
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MicahWedemeyer
Also, please don't get too cute with techniques to derail bots from parsing your email address. I'm more likely not to email you rather than decode your clever cypher.

Maybe you'd prefer to only be emailed by people willing to jump through a lot of hoops, but I'd recommend making it easier for people to reach you, rather than harder.

oscardelben
I guess I'm one of them (ruby obfuscation). I'm going to change it now.
Xavi
I'd argue that "cute obfuscation" techniques aren't needed anymore... gmail's spam filter is pretty good...
keefe
Yep, plus not everyone who scrapes emails is a spammer (such as myself).

Of course, if you put your real email here you're a little crazed.

aarongough
I don't see how that works. I happily put my real email everywhere, I also use my real name... Is that supposed to be a problem?
keefe
I'm posting with my real first name at least... at first I thought you are joking now I am ??? I don't know about you but I have dozens of emails, my "real" one is the one for people I take seriously and close friends.
aarongough
I only have a couple of email addresses. I'm not worried about someone knowing my email address... Why would I be? I comport myself online the exact same way I would face-to-face. If anyone is sending me annoying/abusive emails I can simply block them. But that has never happened...
keefe
lol I think I verge hypergraphia with emails so I segregate on how urgently I need to reply, so for example my "real" email goes to my phone always
dot
Inquiring minds would like to know what you do with these emails that isn't spamming?
keefe
It's not just emails, I collect all manner of information in local cache so that I can search it.

I haven't done this on this site, but on other places I've used this to identify some subset of people that I want to contact. Superficially, that sounds like spamming but I'm not sending mass messages or advertising or wasting people's time or contacting people that don't want to be contacted.

natep
I just added +hn to my gmail address, so that if I do get lots of emails from spammers (unlikely to remove it after scraping), I can just delete it and get a new one, and mostly so I can filter the non-spam emails appropriately.
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sabj
These are my real initials, I haven't added my email yet... though I suppose I should!