[Pmwiki-users] email protection

Steven Leite steven_leite
Thu Feb 26 00:41:03 CST 2004


Yeah, I agree.  This is a big concern of mine as well.

I have two ways to combat this.  The second may be more useful to Pmwiki
folks in particular.

First way is:  Create a gif image with your email address written on .  Then
insert the image.  You can match the image font to your website standard
font so nobody will notice that it's an image, but the bots can't extract
the text from the image.  Note:  You can't hyperlink it becase the bots will
scan the source code of the html document and use the href= tag instead.

Second way is write your email address like this:

<code>userid</code>@<code>domain</code>.<code>com</code>

You still can't effectively hyperlink it because the bots scan the source,
and they'll find the href="mailto: ..." .. so there's no way around that.
I've had to ditch 2 or 3 email accounts over the years due to the amount of
spam I was getting, so I definately think this would be a worthy plug-in to
write.  That way anytime an email address if found, it could be replaced
with the above code.

Unfortunately, a subsequent post also points out there's nothing to stop a
bot from clicking on edit page link and then scooping the information from
the source text.  There was some talk of setting a cookie which seems
reasonable, but that assumes the spammer is not accepting cookies.  So all
the spammer has to do is turn cookies on, run their robot, and then harvest
the addresses.

I think more thoughts and discussion on this would be very beneficial.

Maybe we could enter some syntax in the source code that pmwiki renders (as
in my second idea above).

--S


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dipl.-Ing.(FH) Karl Loncarek" <dh2mll at web.de>
To: "Pmwiki-users" <Pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 8:32 AM
Subject: [Pmwiki-users] email protection


> Hi erveyone,
>
> is there a way to protect email links?
> I want to prevent a robot to collect my email-address (or others) on my
site and sending me spam.
> Newer robots are capable or recognizing e.g. AT instead of @ or spaces
between the letters.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Regards
> Karl
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Pmwiki-users mailing list
> Pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com
> http://pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com
>
>
>




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