Re: Directory limits

[Kevin Halgren <kevin.halgren () WASHBURN EDU>]

Presuming e-mail addresses can be looked up using your directory, the 
main reason I can think of is simply to increase the work-factor for 
spammers hitting your directory to gather e-mail addresses.  I'm sure 20 
is a rather arbitrary number.  I suppose it usually is enough for 
someone to find who they're looking for but to limit the number of 
results exposed.

Here you can look up the list of all faculty and staff, though we only 
deliver 25 results per page.  If a bot wants to hit all the entries in 
our directory to harvest addresses, it just has hit "next" repeatedly 
until it reaches the end.  We don't publish student information in the 
directory, though are people arguing both sides of that issue so 
goodness knows if we will in the future.

Kevin

On 11/16/2012 3:45 PM, Roger A Safian wrote:
> We have a limit the number of returns when looking up entries in our directory of twenty.  We've had this limit, or 
> something like it in place since we discovered fire.  I always thought this was fairly typical.  Recently we have been asked to 
> justify that choice.  As part of that, I'm wondering now, what do others do.  Is this pretty common?

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