Stopping Mugu Maga

Today I added a new layer of spam protection to the site. This new feature primarily affected the site guestbooks, as I have come to learn that a ring of spammers uses them as a source of email address farming.

You may have noticed, from time to time, complimentary and/or mysterious guestbook posts signed by a variant of “Mugu”, “Mugu Maga” or other similar names. These postings are ways for this group to communicate with each other, essentially saying that all postings before theirs have been farmed for email addresses. (Learn more about the "Mugu Mystery" at Liberty.com and the Nigerian 419 Coalition.)

The new guestbook listings still allow people to enter emails and people can send them mail… but the guestbooks no longer display the email addresses. Instead, to email anyone from a guestbook, you must now click onto the mail link and mail through the site. This means that no one can collect emails from the site on any automated system. Note: If you enter your email into the body of a guestbook post or any other article, it will be visible to the public.

Anyone who signed in to post in guestbooks in the past was never in danger of their emails being farmed.

The other change to the mail system is that all outgoing mails now include the sender’s email address. Previously, it would not be added to emails for any users logged in. While this protected against anyone getting an address from member’s outgoing mail, it was redundant—I have changed my assumption that members won’t mind sharing their email address with anyone they consciously send an email to. Previously, a recipient of a member’s email would not be able to click “Reply” and write back—they would have had to go back to the website to send an email.