
Remind HN: Put contact info in your profile if you'd like to be contacted - whalesalad
I&#x27;ve had discourse with about a dozen folks over the last few weeks who have wanted to keep in touch, but their profiles are missing contact info.<p>I have usernames in an XLS to revisit later, but for now, I cannot contact you.<p>Make sure you have an email address in your bio if you&#x27;d like to stay in touch!<p>Edit: the <i>email</i> field is not visible to others. You would need to put it into the <i>about</i> textarea to make it publicly visible.
======
whalesalad
Since posting this and leaving comments below, my inbox has become flooded
with spam garbage.

Some of you are signing me up for mailing lists, gay porn websites, right-wing
anime news? This is no coincidence.

Thank you all for taking time out of your day to “prove me wrong”, I hope you
feel good about it.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> right-wing anime

A little off-topic, but is right-wing anime really a thing?

~~~
krapp
Sure, kind of. Gate, for instance[0], an anime about the JSDF encountering a
portal that opens to a medieval fantasy world, contains a lot of nationalistic
and pro-military themes. Kantai Collection, an anime based on a game, features
IJN ships as heros, and some historical revisionism[1]. I can't think of more
off the top of my head. It doesn't seem to be a common theme but it's entirely
possible I as a typical Western weeb just don't see it. A lot of anime set in
the future portray Western powers in a negative light - the American Empire in
Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex is clearly villainous - but I don't
know if that's "right wing" or just reasonable extrapolation.

It seems to be more common to discover the creators of an anime or manga
holding right-wing or extreme beliefs, though, than for those to explicitly
find their way into anime. The director of Recovery of an MMO Junkie, for
instance[2] with his anti-semitic tweets.

[0][https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Gate](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Gate)

[1][https://anitay.kinja.com/thoughts-from-outside-historical-
re...](https://anitay.kinja.com/thoughts-from-outside-historical-revisionism-
in-kancol-1694607175)

[2][https://kotaku.com/anime-director-causes-controversy-with-
an...](https://kotaku.com/anime-director-causes-controversy-with-antisemitic-
twee-1823182353)

------
mindcrime
My email is in my profile, and it's impossible to distinguish "spam received
because somebody scraped my HN profile" from "spam received because somebody
bought my email address from some dark web market". So I mostly don't even
consider the spam aspect.

OTOH, I get a message every now and then saying something like "I saw your
book recommendations in thread XYZ and really appreciate them" or "Dude, I
totally agree with your comment on $FOO" or something. Those are rare, but
highly appreciated. I'd be happy to have my email in my profile just for
those.

~~~
jedberg
I solve this with a catchall domain which is in my profile. It says "email me
at {anything}@jedberg.net". Gmail quickly learned that emails actually
addressed to {anything} are spam (although to be fair Gmail's filters are
pretty good in general).

If you don't want to set up a catchall, a good second alternative is plus
addressing. Put foo+hn@bar.com. Almost all of the spammers will _drop_ the
plus address but real senders will use it.

~~~
m463
I remember when Jerry Pournelle had a blog, he would request that you put a
certain word in the subject line. I'm uncertain, but he might have even
changed the word from time to time.

------
allenleein
Feel free to spam me some Haskell or business strategy :)

\--

Haskell, Lisp Developer at Wormhole Technologies.

(We are hiring Haskell Engineer: al@wormhole.technology)

[Blog:
[https://allenleein.github.io/brains/](https://allenleein.github.io/brains/)]

[ my public key:
[https://keybase.io/allenleein;](https://keybase.io/allenleein;) my proof:
[https://keybase.io/allenleein/sigs/tfmUy09f1y-EvF2b6jlpwMZPv...](https://keybase.io/allenleein/sigs/tfmUy09f1y-EvF2b6jlpwMZPv_aesYfx1CNbcLMMAlU)
]

~~~
eatbitseveryday
Your keybase url is 404. Remove the ;

~~~
quickthrower2
The root github pages of that URL is also 404 so could be a configuration
error?

------
kylek
No, thanks. It's pretty unfortunate HN doesn't have its own messaging system.
Also lame that I can't edit/delete old posts from e.g. hiring threads. Some of
us don't want to cross the streams. (Sorry, I'm not you!)

------
weinzierl
Also people _do_ check your profile if they find your comments or submissions
interesting, so don't forget to write a little bit about yourself - except you
want to stay completely anonymous, which is OK too. All but one of the top ten
leader profiles are good examples for how you write an appealing profile.

------
omarhaneef
Aren't you worried about Nigerian princes contacting you to help get their
money out of the country?

It is an interesting problem. I just put my twitter handle and hope that
people will tweet at me to get my attention. Leaving DMs open is still
spamable.

I read through other solutions and there isn't a good one. If HN allowed
communication after a certain Karma threshold, that might work.

~~~
hutzlibu
". If HN allowed communication after a certain Karma threshold, that might
work. "

That might work, but with direct messaging, not with, "you see all emails
after karma x".

~~~
omarhaneef
Yes.

Edit: Misunderstood the response, and I changed no to yes.

------
untog
Relatedly, be sure not to make your email address public if you _don 't_ want
to be contacted! HN is a deceptively public place, you may end up with
unwanted messages before you know it.

I'd suggest something not quite as easily scrapable/spammable as your email
address, but I'm not sure what the best alternative is.

~~~
avinassh
+1. I suggest using some service like scrim where you enter a simple captcha
to retrieve the email - [http://scr.im](http://scr.im)

~~~
ChristianBundy
Firefox is warning me that they have a self-signed TLS certificate. Is that
intended?

EDIT: After accepting the warning it now says "Site not found" with a
DreamHost error. Hmm.

~~~
kylek
(the link is to http, not https. Try without https-everywhere/etc. I think all
dreamhosts sites are like this, not actually providing https. Is that a paid
extra or something?)

~~~
dylz
IIRC it's free. You might need to opt in.

------
Hitton
I wonder what level of obfuscation is necessary to safely publicly share your
email. Is foo (at) example.com enough?

------
chrisked
Used to have my email in my bio but switched to keybase. I have not
experienced Nigerian princess like spam but mentioned newsletter sign-ups.
This was the reason to switch to keybase.

On another note HN has interesting user segments. Quite a few people reach out
to me when they are about to relocate to Germany as an expat and have some
questions. Did roughly 20 phone calls the last quarter. There are 2 distinct
groups reaching out. One group reaches out with their real email and we have a
nice phone chat after. The other group reaches out with a uniquely created
email, does not intro themselves during or after the phone call. Staying
anonymous is an odd way to make friends or stay in contact :)

------
HNLurker2
I do but nobody contacts to me :-(

~~~
saagarjha
They might if you weren't a lurker ;)

------
hbcondo714
My HN profile about text just includes my personal website url which has a
contact form which emails me. Hope that suffices, looking forward to hearing
from HN users!

------
bdcravens
My profile tells you how to contact me without providing scrapable data.

"My HN username is how you'll find me pretty much everywhere else."

------
ancarda
Huh, I just realized my about box is totally empty - at-least when I use an
incognito window. Does it only show up for logged in users?

~~~
eatbitseveryday
I’m logged in. Yours appears empty. And I doubt there is selective display
based on this.

~~~
o-__-o
Hunter2

------
jordan801
Seems like a great way to get spammed to death. (Pauses to build a scrapper to
collect HN user emails).

~~~
jacques_chester
Actually, I get relatively little spam on the addresses in my profile.

Where I get a _lot_ of spam is via one-off email addresses I would use each
month in "Who's Hiring?" posts. Those threads are absolutely being scraped and
resold.

~~~
adventured
Same here. I added an email address a few years ago and have received maybe
six pieces of spam. Someone added me to a tech related mailing list without my
permission, that was only very slightly annoying.

------
giancarlostoro
First thing on my profile is my KeyBase key, I would love to talk to more
people on there, for now I mainly use it for storage and to chat with the odd
bird that uses it. I did just notice I do have my protonmail email there
though.

------
maxwell
Hmm, just updated my about and now it seems to be only visible to me when
logged in...

------
weatherlight
I have my keybase handle there. e-mail is too easy to scrape.

~~~
teejmya
Same, I think it accomplishes the same goal.

------
Bootwizard
I'm the guy writing that book, updated my profile. Hope to hear from you soon
:)

------
muzani
I've been contacted by a few people on HN. One lives in the same city and
we're good friends now. There's a few wbo become mentors, discuss business
ideas, etc.

Sure, there's the risk of getting spammed and signed up for right-wing midget
porn but the benefits outweigh the potential damage.

------
DoreenMichele
This might have gone better if couched as an FYI instead of an imperative:

 _If you want to be contacted, you need to list your contact info in your
profile. The "email" field is not publicly visible. It is a common mistake on
HN to assume that it is._

Then you might not be getting trolled so badly.

------
sdinsn
Remind HN: Don't put contact info in your profile or else you'll get spammed

~~~
povertyworld
Just imagine the amount of salesy BS and recruiter spam that must come from
HN.

~~~
dangrossman
Very little in my experience.

