This is one of the few message boards on the internet that does not require registration. When you register with most other boards (including the AllCoast board, which is excellent by the way, and which also requires your email address) you are asked for a certain amount of personal information. That information is not being gathered for fun. It is being used or sold for other purposes.

But not here at rodbuilding.org. We do require your actual name and valid email address, but that is all. And your email address is not being sold by anyone at rodbuilding.org. Yes, it is possible for someone to collect your address from this board if they so wish. But while this is the most active rod building message board on the internet, it pales in numbers compared to message boards dealing with other topics or subjects. I seriously doubt those in the business of buying or selling email addresses would be too excited about mining them here.

We have a good thing going here and I have no plans to change anything for the forseeable future. I respect the right of anyone who chooses not to post here and will not try to change their minds. There are many good rod building message boards on the internet and you should be able to find one that is agreeable to you if this one isn't.


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Just to add a little reassurance, most spam harvesters are web 'robots' that search through the code on any given page looking for text that resembles an email address.

If you look at the code for the pages generated by this board, you'll see that your email addresses are ascii encoded to fool spam harvesters. Tom's email address, for example, looks like this:
rodmaker@earth link.net

While it's not impossible to decode, most spam bots don't bother - there are enough addresses to harvest without doing the extra coding.

And speaking of where spam comes from - those of you who use any of the free email services such as Yahoo or Hotmail (Hotmail is owned by Microsoft by the way), should look to those services as the source of 99% of the spam you receive. Each time you send an email, the recipient’s address you use is collected by your email provider. Each time you receive an email, the sender’s address is collected as well. If you are using a free email service and are getting lots of spam, don’t look to this board as being the source - your email provider is the one who is providing/selling your email address.


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