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Looking for marina webmasters to trade scuttlebutt

Discussion in 'Technical Discussion' started by captainccs, May 6, 2004.

  1. captainccs, May 6, 2004
    #1
    captainccs

    captainccs Aye, aye capt'n

    Joined:
    Jan 30, 2004
    Messages:
    7
    Location:
    Caracas, Venezuela
    I would like to compare notes with other marina webmasters to find out how we can improve our web sites. We were getting so much SPAM in our info email address that I decided to discontinue it and to replace it with a contact form. So far this month we have received 4 inquiries in 6 days which is a conversion rate of 2.5% based on the number of unique visitors we get, around 900 a month.

    If anyone here is interested in marina scuttlebutt, please send me a PM or, if Carl does not mind, we can maybe discuss it on the forum.
  2. YachtForums, May 7, 2004
    #2
    YachtForums

    YachtForums Administrator

    Joined:
    Dec 22, 2002
    Messages:
    20,660
    Location:
    South Florida
    Hi Denny,

    A marina scuttlebut thread is an awesome idea! Actually, it sounds like a good forum header. If others are interested, I'll create a category for it. Let's see if others chime-in on this thread with some marina stories, news, etc.

    Nice to hear from you, Denny. Your site looks GREAT!

    Carl
  3. captainccs, May 7, 2004
    #3
    captainccs

    captainccs Aye, aye capt'n

    Joined:
    Jan 30, 2004
    Messages:
    7
    Location:
    Caracas, Venezuela
    Why thanks, Carl! That's very nice of you!
  4. aloha27, Jun 8, 2004
    #4
    aloha27

    aloha27 New Member

    Joined:
    May 18, 2004
    Messages:
    2
    Location:
    Nova Scotia Canada
    Marina Scuttlebutt

    At Barrachois Harbour Yacht Club (Yahoo Keyword- Barrachois) we've reduced the amount of spam considerably simply by re-writing our e-mail addy to words only!
    Instead of bhyc@canada.com, we tried bhyc at canada dot com. Consequently, we now get about one or two spam messages daily rather than the 60 to 70.

    Steve
  5. captainccs, Jun 8, 2004
    #5
    captainccs

    captainccs Aye, aye capt'n

    Joined:
    Jan 30, 2004
    Messages:
    7
    Location:
    Caracas, Venezuela
    That works very well when you have "non-standard" email addresses like "bhyc." It is quite a different problem when you have "common" addresses like "info," "sales," "webmaster" and so on. In your case robots were doing the harvesting and that is stopped by not having a properly formatted email address on the web site. With the common names the problem is that they don't need to harvest them, they just mail to every probable combination: "info@domain," "sales@domain," "webmaster@domain" and so on. Since it costs practically nothing to send an email, they can afford to send millions of pieces with no real recipient.

    I have not gone to the point of altering any email addresses on any of my sites to the point where it cannot open an mail client but I have encryped the links by converting the clear text into "HTML entities." Here is a link to the script I use:

    cardumen.com/tools/code-email.php