i just commited some changes into CVS:

• users now can decide (when registering or editing their profile) if their email-address may appear public or not. if they decide it should *not* be public it will also not appear on any administrative page (like the members-page for admins of a weblog).
• users can now also enter an email-address as url in their profile, which will be prefixed with "mailto:" if missing (a partial implementation of this request).

I also modified the current version of antville running here on antville.org: email-addresses are generally not displayed, not even on administrative pages.

(short note to project members: i'm offline for the next week since i'll be on the road to vienna).

I'd like to see any plain text appearance of email adresses [in generated HTML] to contain only character entity references instead of the real characters - a common spam-harvester defense method.

mailto:earl@gmx.at gets mailto:earl@gmx.at rendered by browsers, this gets usable again: test

I think there's room to improve the profile page:

[screenshot] [/screenshot]

• The email-is-public checkbox does not have a label (in the left column, like the other entry elements), it only has the light gray explanation.
• The difference between selecting the checkbox and entering an email address in the "Link" field below is not at all clear.
• There's no explanation for the * in the Link label. I think it means that this field is optional.

I propose the "Link" field should be labeled "URL" or "Personal URL", with the additional help text that a) this will be displayed next to one's stories and comments, and b) if an email address is entered, it will displayed as mailto: link. The Checkbox might be called "Email visible to site administrators", with the additional text explaining who/where can see the email address if the box is checked.

A general problem for me that I've also heard elsewhere: The gray color used in many places in the Antville default styles is too light. What about making it a bit darker?

Another general problem with Antville: Pages lack titles. From a quick test it looks like only the skin editor page displays a decent title. The Preferences page displays a title in normal text style, and most other pages don't display a title at all. Any ideas for how to fix this?