Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Tip #73 (Approved): Enable to Hide/Show User Email

Reasoning:
This is a must-have feature for any site.

Implementation:
Do it on HEAD, before oacs-5-2 is branched, also implement it at opeancs.org. We already have partially the code working.

We need a user profiling system, that allows any community member to give permission on the elements of his profile. Which involves a considerably better UI for permissions in general, but let's take it step by step :).

One thing you have to take into account, that /shared/community-member is not the only place to access the e-mail of the user. Therefore you should enforce that parameter site wide. Which is difficult taking into account that you can just query the database :).

The sencond stage will be to show the email for the public but not in an easy to grab it by spammers, lets say, the email will be shown like myemail AT thesite_dot_com, or if imagemagick is installed, then we'll show it as an image, but this will go in another TIP.

"there were a bunch of similar fields in ACS < 4 the notion was a hierarchy of "privacy levels" you could set that would get increasingly tighter as you changed the level"

"Apparently that got copied partially into ACS 4.0 but without the logic that actually implements it"

And this is how it works:

acs-subsite with improvements:
acs-subsite has now a way to protect users emails by allowing users to choose the way
they want to show their e-mails, the field priv_email field at users table handles that:
4 = Normal email text link (mailto)
3 = As an image (Need ImageMagick software)
2 = Contact the user using a form.
1 = Not showing the email at all

If the user hasn't change his/her email-privacy-level (how the email is shown), then the site-wide-admin can choose how email will be shown by the EmailPrivacyLevelP parameter of acs-subsite.

Procedure:
One proc,"get_user_email", does all the work. So if want to show the user's email, you MUST use this function, that will return the proper html code.

For #3 level, when someone goes to shared/comunity-member's page for instance, the get_user_emai proc generates an image if is created (if
the user or the site-wide-admin especified and if the ImageMagick software is present) with the email of
the user on it, if the ImageMagick software is not present then the @ symbol is replaced with an image
to protect the email. If the email-image was created then it's stored on the content repository.
When a user edit his/her email then a new revision of the image is created as well.
A relation was created between the item_id and user_id to know what image is asociated to a user_id.
A content_folder and content_type were also created to store the users email-images.

For #2, when the user doesnt want to show their email, will be given link to a form were a message can be
sent to the user without showing his/her email.
The change of the level of privacy makes an update of the users table by changing
the priv_email field. All new users have for default level 5 in the priv_email field. When the priv_email equals
5 then the way that emails are shown is especified in the PrivateEmailLevelP parameter, otherwise the email will be
shown in the way that users especified (priv_email 4,priv_email 3,priv_email 2,priv_email 1)

The site-wide-admin can change the PrivateEmailLevelP in the acs-admin/users were a link to manage-email-privacy was created. And the user can change the way his/her email is shown in pvt/home.

We also change this pages that were showing the email of the user as well:
acs-subsite/www/members/index.tcl (/mebmers/)
acs-subsite/www/shared/community-meber.tcl (/shared/community-member)

dotlrn:
dotlrn/www/mebers.tcl (Mebers list)
dotlrn/www/spam-recipients (Spam all users)
dotlrn/www/members-chunk.adp
dotlrn-portlet/www/dotlrn-members-staff-portlet.adp

Thanks to Miguel that did the development of this feature. (it works for pg and oracle =) )