The discussion revolves around hiding the main admin email address from the /about page of a Discourse forum to prevent spam. dizzit explains that setting the email address to blank isn’t an option since system emails still need to be received. itsbhanusharma suggests changing the contact email in Admin > Settings, but bloomexperiment offers a more suitable solution by setting a value for the contact_url setting, which replaces the email address on the /about page. However, dizzit notes that the email address is still present in the HTML source, potentially allowing spambots to scrape it.
On the /about page of Discourse forums, it shows the main admin email address:
Contact Us
In the event of a critical issue or urgent matter affecting this site, please contact us at email@example.com
How do I hide this? I’m getting heaps of spam on this address, and I don’t want any email address shown publicly at all anyway.
Also, I still need to receive discourse system email to that address, so setting it to blank isn’t an option.
in Admin > Settings search for contact email and remove/change it to some other address.
I think if you set a value for the contact_url setting, it will show that on the /about page (instead of the email address from contact_email)
@traceymoko: Thanks! Yep this solved the visible part of it at least, the email address is no longer displayed on the /about page.
Although when I view source in my browser, and look and the HTML given to the browser, it still has the current contact email address in the HTML inside a <div class="hidden" id="data-preloaded" data-preloaded=...> tag such as \"contact_email\":\"currentadminemail@example.com\",
A bit strange. And I guess that spambot scraping the pages are still going to get the email address exactly the same way.
I even tried changing the email address to a different one, but it does serve whatever the current email address is, i.e. it’s not a caching issue.