RE: Spammer crawling www.php.net message boards for addresses

Well, surely there are ways to do it.. How about crypting the address with a random password and providing an URL, which decrypts it? Something like <? $tmpid=uniqid(...); $pass=md5("somethingsecret".$tmpid); $encoded=base64_encode(mcrypt_encrypt(MCRYPT_SOMETHING, $pass, $email, ....)); echo "<a href='http://www.php.net/showemail.php?code=$tmpid&encd=$encoded">Show author's email</a>"; ?> And then you can decode it back in showemail.php and show it to the user, possibly as an image with lots of noise... After they hack through this, we can really stop displaying them :) Mitja -----Original Message----- From: James Cox [mailto:james@imajes.info] Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 3:28 AM To: David McArthur; webmaster@php.net; postmaster@php.net Subject: RE: Spammer crawling www.php.net message boards for addresses > -----Original Message----- > From: David McArthur [mailto:david@davidmcarthur.com] > > In case you're interested, here is spam (attached) I just received to > an address <php.net@davidmcarthur.com> that has only ever appeared on > www.php.net documentation note boards. I'm sure this happens all the > time, and I don't expect you to do anything about it. Just FYI, > someone is clearly crawling your boards for addresses and removing > your obfuscation. i think we're getting to a point where our only option would be to create images of the mailto:s, or add random text strings that have javascript which decodes them.. or store them as base64 encoded strings, and again use js to decode them. I think whatever we do, the spammers are going to get clever -- so what's the point? Therefore, i propose we just drop displaying email addresses. -- james