Great job, except one thing. Can’t providing *any* contact info be obligatory? What’s the point of making specifically the email address required? What are benefits of having it *over other contact info*?
- Automatic verification of some kind? No. That would require client-side system coupled with email accounts.
- Limiting abuse by requiring an email? No. Emails are cheap. Much cheaper than e.g. obtaining a domain and having some specific DNS entry or web page provided. That at least costs some money and confirms that the operator has control over the domain.
- Increasing contact? No. I was offering an email address for some time and the only experience was no single message from a human actually contacting me about Tor. Everything was only spam. Suggesting address rotation or antispam filters is merely an attempt to dismiss the issue, not an answer to it.
I see it as putting more burden on operator for no good reason and making yet another service require an easily abuseable information to be released. I’m aware of of benefits of email (open, “everyone” uses it) and downsides of other options (limited access, abusive or poorly designed websites), but are those really the argument for making this specific information trivially harvestable?
As long as this is optional, it’s not a huge problem. But I do not believe in ignoring stuff simply because temporarily it does not affect me personally.
mpan