Reminder: The email field is only visible to mods, not other users. If you want your email to be visible to other users, add it to your "about".

I highly recommend adding your email to your profile. I get emails from HNer's sparsely (about once a month) and they're always detailed, specific, and respectful of my time.

Best think I have done in my entire internet life is using my real name on HN (a first for this anonymous privacy hawk!) and leaving my contacts.

You folks have been the best! Great face to face meetings too.

I wish I had the same foresight you did - my one regret about signing up for HN is not using my real name as my username.

It would be great if pg added the ability to change one's username, but given the HN community's usual sentiment on feature requests (a sentiment I share), I'm not holding my breath.

You might want to obfuscate it though. No need to unnecessarily add to the mountain of spam that you already have to wade through because of the surprisingly large number of false positives in Gmail's Spam folder. I have even had SVN commit notifications end up in my Spam folder, even though I have rules in place to tag them! You'd think they would put any emails that I have tag rules for on a whitelist.

Also, please don't get too cute with techniques to derail bots from parsing your email address. I'm more likely not to email you rather than decode your clever cypher.

Maybe you'd prefer to only be emailed by people willing to jump through a lot of hoops, but I'd recommend making it easier for people to reach you, rather than harder.

I'd argue that "cute obfuscation" techniques aren't needed anymore... gmail's spam filter is pretty good...

Yep, plus not everyone who scrapes emails is a spammer (such as myself).

Of course, if you put your real email here you're a little crazed.

I don't see how that works. I happily put my real email everywhere, I also use my real name... Is that supposed to be a problem?

I'm posting with my real first name at least... at first I thought you are joking now I am ??? I don't know about you but I have dozens of emails, my "real" one is the one for people I take seriously and close friends.

I only have a couple of email addresses. I'm not worried about someone knowing my email address... Why would I be? I comport myself online the exact same way I would face-to-face. If anyone is sending me annoying/abusive emails I can simply block them. But that has never happened...

lol I think I verge hypergraphia with emails so I segregate on how urgently I need to reply, so for example my "real" email goes to my phone always

Inquiring minds would like to know what you do with these emails that isn't spamming?

It's not just emails, I collect all manner of information in local cache so that I can search it.

I haven't done this on this site, but on other places I've used this to identify some subset of people that I want to contact. Superficially, that sounds like spamming but I'm not sending mass messages or advertising or wasting people's time or contacting people that don't want to be contacted.

I just added +hn to my gmail address, so that if I do get lots of emails from spammers (unlikely to remove it after scraping), I can just delete it and get a new one, and mostly so I can filter the non-spam emails appropriately.

I guess I'm one of them (ruby obfuscation). I'm going to change it now.

HN should have some very basic private messaging, like Reddit has had since the very early days.

To more easily implement, might I suggest the anonymized email approach a la Craigslist, with some karma floor for sending.

It already has messaging capability, but it's only enabled for YC and founders. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112732.

I'm not sure how Reddit does, but how would you deal with spam?

I've found this to be very helpful - I've received more than a few emails through my HN profile from people interested in what I am working on - often from people who did not publicly comment on anything I was doing at all.

There have also been time when I've wanted to contact people and couldn't.

Put your blog/site/projects in there too. I like to browse the profiles of people making interesting comments to see what they are up to.

Or to see if someone making a strong statement has any experience whatsoever to back it up.

Where is your contact info?

Sorry, Updated. I had an impression that the email field would reflect in my profile info.

I still don't see anything. Does changing about box needs time to update?

It's there now, so I guess it does (caching proxy maybe)?

Since this is about your "About" section of the profile, I have to ask: Why are the links you add to your profile not clickable to people who view it? Is it because of spam? Or some other reason? I just found this always interesting to me.

Probably due to spam, but I wish PG would just add links with rel=nofollow instead.

Eh, rel=nofollow is kinda like those car stereos that won't play unless you put in a code. Doesn't stop people from ripping them off, they'll just figure out it's useless later.

Just put a minimum karma requirement in for links in the profile to be clickable.

Yeah, but we want to avoid search engines from following the links, not humans. Search engines respect nofollow.

And humans, or human-coded robots for that matter who are ignorant of nofollow will still post all kinds of blogspam, thinking it's effective.

Please also add your location if you're comfortable sharing that.

These are my real initials, I haven't added my email yet... though I suppose I should!