Mailing List Threat to School Alumni Lists

BobLennon

I've recently put up a website for the alumni of a high school (http://www.alumnihost.com) with a lot of data from the yearboks, newspapers, and recent alumni status information.

Unfortunately, it now seems to be in danger of the mailing list people, and I am getting a lot of hits that seem to sequemce through the database, person by person, class by class.

Although registration on the site is currently optional, I am thinking about restricting the site to registered owners, or limiting successive requests for address information to be limited, unless the individual identifies themselves and registers with the system.

I'd appreciate any insights you may have on this issue.

Thanks...Bob Lennon

ahundiak

Are you actually putting emails up on a public site? If so, don't do that. Give registered users a means to contact each other.

BobLennon

ahundiak wrote:
Are you actually putting emails up on a public site? If so, don't do that. Give registered users a means to contact each other.

I guess you are saying unless you register, you recommend that no person can see any of the information about graduates of the school and I should give users a different way to contact each other.

The site currently includes a PHB/BB2 forum to allow the users to contact one another, and I do not want to restrict the viewers from freely viewing the class information.

My goals are to publish all the public information about the alumni of this school including the yearbooks, news reports, feedback, reunion pictures. anecdotal stories, and obituaries to the community. This is especially important to those merchants who sponsor the site but cannot be authenticated because they are not graduates.

And although registration allows a user to either publish or exclude information that is displayed on the web if they are registered, I want to keep the registration optional in order to allow free exchange of graduate information, and still allow anyone to view all the site information

Also while is relatively easy to track each user interaction with PHP, I was really wondering what the most effective strategey would be to deter extensive downloads of this information to those interested in simply compiling mailing lists.

My initial thoughts were to limit the number of sequential alphabetic inquiry sequences that could be made from the database during a specified time without being registered and authenticated. I'm sure there are better ways also to deal with this problem.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks...Bob Lennon