From the RSS 2.0 Specification:
<author>is an optional sub-element of<item>.It’s the email address of the author of the item. For newspapers and magazines syndicating via RSS, the author is the person who wrote the article that the
<item>describes. For collaborative weblogs, the author of the item might be different from the managing editor or webmaster. For a weblog authored by a single individual it would make sense to omit the element.
<author>lawyer@boyer.net (Lawyer Boyer)</author>
I guess it could be removed since it’s optional and there is already a link to the author’s profile page in the <description>. I get that we don’t want to disclose the user’s mail address, but the no-reply address doesn’t make much sense either.
My feed reader shows it like this:
