[Pydotorg-redesign] Proposed contact page

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2003 at 04:27:04PM +0200, Laura Creighton wrote:
>I don't understand how this helps with the viruses.  (I don't disagree,
>I just don't understand).

Most of the current crop of viruses will search the web browser cache
for mailto: links and use the addresses as recipients or as faked
senders.  Pretty much every single page on python.org has an 'E-mail
us' and a mailto pointing at webmaster, so anyone who's ever gotten
infected and browsed python.org at some point will likely end up
generating e-mails to us.  

(Hmm, http://www.harrison.k12.co.us/tech-support/help/anti-virus/klez.html
is a really nice explanation of how Klez works.  Should weblog that page...)

If every page has a 'contact us' link to the same HTML page, and only
that one page has a mailto, that page may only end up in the browser
cache if people explicitly follow that link, and relatively few people
will do that.  

The trade-off is that this slightly decreases usability.  Also, some
sections have different authors -- e.g. the link is for docs@, not
webmaster@ -- and it's unclear what to do in this case: list all such
author addresses on the contact us page?  Only suppress the webmaster@
mailtos and leave docs@ and other addresses to fend for themselves?

>I don't know if having a separate page for tutor, which you can link
>to from many places, ditto python-list is  a compatible solution, or

Having separate pages wouldn't be a problem.

>The most useful page for me on python.org is a list of all the mailman
>maintained mailing lists on python.org.  If this is going away, then

Mailman automatically provides such a listing:
mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo .  Unfortunately it provides only the
most telegraphic explanation for each list, so the listing isn't very
newbie-friendly.

--amk