Re: Hide email addresses from spam bots

tedd wrote: > There are only two ways for a spambot to get your email address from > a web site: A) to read it via a screen reader, which is exceedingly > slow. I may be wrong, but I doubt that any serious harvester would > consider this method; B) to read it via text contained within your > web site. C) Run it through a regular HTML parser. > A) With the first you could use CAPTCHA, see: Argle. http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ > http://xn--ovg.com The requested URL /www.xn--ovg.com/captcha was not found on this server. > B) With the second, you need to disguise your email address such that > spambots don't understand it. > > One way is to use Enkoder (it's javascript): > http://automaticlabs.com/enkoderform/ Which requires the end user to have JavaScript turned on, and assumes that bots can't parse JavaScript (they can, maybe not all, but certainly some). > Using javascript isn't bad -- at last count less than 9 percent of > surfers don't have javascript. There is no way to reliably gather such statistics. > Another way is to use PHP, but it is involved. PHP won't provide you with a way to display an email address to a human but not to a spambot. > I direct you to "PHP Cookbook" O'Reilly by Sklar page 188. I'm not going to buy a book so I can explain why the technique won't work. -- David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/> Home is where the ~/.bashrc is