We display alot of users information on our sites including their email addresses. Whats the best technique to use to still display the email addresses but hurt the spam-spiders from grabing this information?
Thanks
that's a nifty idea, to just swap out the @ symbol. it could certainly be effective, but it really comes down to how robust the individual spidering programs are.
it's possible that some spiders will still zero in on the .com element as an indicator that there is an email that can be harvested. there's really no way to know absolutely, since it's all about the spidering program's capabilities.
i make it a habit to fully encode the addresses on my sites in order to keep the evil-doer spammer spidering to an absolute minimum. that way, there's no .com, etc. elements that can raise a flag.
There are companies who program these spiders for a living. I doubt many popular encoding services would fool the spiders. Best thing you could do is write your own custum email obscurator using ideas from the scripts posted above.
If youre running unix you could use GD or image magic to create an image with the email addresses on them. To really cause some troble with spammer, add random nonexistant email addresses as the ALT tag of the images.
If you are sticking plain text email addresses on a site then my best advice is to:
1. Get some good spam filtering on the email account AND the machine picking up the mail.
2. Live with it.
Obfuscating via Javascript is certainly an option but as has been mentioned it's not going to take much to "crack" them.
A custom written obfuscator would possibly stand a better chance of success than a commonly used one.
What happens if javascript isn't available?
Using images is another option, however be prepared for accessibility problems especially if you don't use the alt attribute properly - as it's meant to be used.
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