Author: M.Prince (29 Nov 05 10:38pm)
We're just covering all bases. Here is the situation we were thinking of when our lawyers drafted that paragraph:
- You install a honey pot.
- Someone donates a domain to the Project which is "inappropriate."
- Your honey pot serves up email addresses based on usernames + donated domains.
- The potential exists that your honey pot could display an email address that may be deemed inappropriate.
Now, that's the worst case scenario. Let me tell you what we do to stop it. First, we carefully screen the domains that are donated against a list of inappropriate words and phrases. Scan these message boards and you'll see far more complaints about people who want to donate domains and our draconian scanner won't let them. Things that would get stopped:
executiveASSistant.com
If I remember the algorithm correctly, we'd even stop:
executiveA55istant.com
Now we may miss some on the first, automatic pass, but we try and weed them out when we manually review the donated domains. As an aside, if you want to donate a domain with an inappropriate phrase as a part of it, you still can, you just have to mark it as "private." That means it will only appear on honey pots you install, not honey pots other people do.
So we try and make sure the domains are rated-G. Then we hide the email addresses -- the only part likely to be "inappropriate" -- displayed on honey pots in such a way that human beings would typically never see them. As a result, a human would have to view the source of the page in order to see the email address that may contain a domain that could be inappropriate.
That is on top of the fact that the way we recommend you install the honey pots they too should be completely hidden from human visitors. So the series of improbable things would have to happen before anything inappropriate was seen by a visitor to your site:
1. The visitor would have to find the hidden honey pot
2. The visitor would have to view the HTML source of the page
3. Someone would have to donate an inappropriate domain
4. It would have to get by our automatic screening process
5. It would have to get by our manual screening process
6. It would have to be randomly selected from a pool of thousands to be displayed on your honey pot
Pretty unlikely, but.... you know.... lawyers.
Finally, there's a way to guard against even this unlikely possibility. You can install a honey pot and mark it only to display email addresses generated with domains you donate yourself. The same way that you can mark a domain as private, you can mark your honey pot to only use your own donated domains. You can therefore ensure not only they are G-rated, but that you completely control what they will always be.
Hopefully that all makes sense. Let us know if you have any more questions.
Matthew.
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