If you applied for this cycle, please tell us your email address | Hacker News Reader

If you applied for this cycle, please tell us your email address

61 pointspg18 comments

We're about to send out the responses for this cycle, and we've found that a lot of applicants haven't put their email addresses in their profiles. So if you applied this cycle and you want a response, please edit your profile and put your email address in the email field.

(Sorry for the inconvenience. In the next version we won't let people submit applications unless there's a valid address there, but this sw only gets used every 6 months so it doesn't evolve very fast.)

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Just to clarify (this bit me last year): many people put their email addresses in the "about:" field of their profiles, so that other HN readers can email them. Here, pg is referring specifically to the "email:" field, which isn't publicly viewable but is the canonical email address used for YC announcements.

In sum, the problem is that

a lot of applicants haven't put their email addresses in their profiles

and the solution is to

put your email address in the email field [and not just the about field].

Some people put their email only in the "email:" field, without realizing that it is invisible to others. Putting it in both About: and Email: would be nice, so that we (the other readers) can send a personal email if needed.

Solution: Add an option to specify whether your email field is public or private. That would resolve the confusion.

We've asked pg before :-(

Your solution will work only for new users, unless "public" is the default (opt-out for current users). This can piss off people.

Will YC send emails to all the co-founders? Or just the ones that submitted the application?

Just the submitters.

Correction: Looks like we're going to mail everyone.

Thx pg

Are you going to send e-mail for everybody? (Chosen ones and not chosen?)

"... We're about to send out the responses for this cycle, and we've found that a lot of applicants haven't put their email addresses in their profiles ..."

A form of self selection in a way. I can't believe that after multiple selections this message hasn't got through yet. Only 4/16 on this thread ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348070 (not a true indication of application) had contact emails.

Deleted comment

Yes, we'll send them tonight regardless.

may want to fix your post, just to make sure you don't get any spammy junk...

please edit your profile and put your email address in the email field.

Does this really make a difference? Are there any studies of gmail with addresses that are hidden vesus those with plain text email addresses for bots? The critical number is the false negative/positive amount, not the absolute number of spam. And surely spammers can already find ivan[at]tipjoy[dot]com

A good way to stop spam is using JavaScript to ROT13 encrypt the address. This way you can display it in plain text, but when a bot looks to search through the source on a page it just sees JavaScript jibberish.

TextMate can do this for you automatically.

For a site, you could just have a small back end script that looks for an email address in standard format and then encrypts it. You get something like this: <script type="text/javascript">document.write( "nneba\100nangbzlnqf\056pbz".replace(/[a-zA-Z]/g, function(c){return String.fromCharCode((c<="Z"?90:122)>=(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);})); </script>