Hi, I see contact email is listed on the forum "contact us"
I am wondering is it good or bad thing? I mean spam bots and stuff?
Whats your experience?
Maybe its better to remove it or edit it in some way to prevent spam?
Well I'm guessing if it's not empty, you don't have anything to worry about
I've never had any problems, even though like noone ever visits my forums
well you know those email scraping bots etc. They crawl the net looking for emails.
For instance this forum contact:
mailto: contact AT mybboard.com (I edited it)
Don't spam bots hit this addy just because its available just like that?
It depends. And not all 'spam bots' "search" for email addresses - that would take too long to make sure their valid, check tons of sites on the web, etc. I'm guessing they're just people who have nothing better to do with their time.
You don't have to put an e-mail address in there, you can just as well make it point to a contact form with captcha if you like. and yes, spam bots hit any address, not just the ones they find on web pages, but also randomly generated / guessed ones.
You need a spam filter either way, unless you like to change your address every couple of weeks. All it takes for a mail address to get spammed is one guy who knows your address to leak it somewhere (or you sending a mail to someone who has a virus on his windows system). If it's not something common such as admin@domain, forum@domain, etc. those are likely to see some spam mails anyway.