Email addys on Home Page
by i know there's bots out there that scan for email addys on pages. how do you recommend hiding them from the bots?
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14 Comments
how about you just change your email address everyday. seems to much easier.
or just use snail mail... or the pony express.
i'm considering a little javascript: AntiSpambotMailto()
oh, you didn't say you were using a mailto: ok, then that little javascript is a good idea to get around this.
ok firgured out a pretty good way. If its your web page, and you want to display your email address, without the text being scraped by a bot for spam, then make every place where you'd put your email an img tag pointing to a .jpg of your email address. like->
that's not a bad idea. until spammers start OCR'ing for emails hahah
yeah, thats quite possible, but hopefully much more expensive for them. they'd have to download and scan all the images on a web-page, that would take a lot of time and resources. at the moment all they do is get the text of the page, which is much, much less bandwith, time, and computation to search for an email address
well, i already thought of that (except with flash), but i worried about d/l time. still thinkin' about it. (another issue is that the mailto: info would be in the source code, which could be scanned.)
"address at domain dot com" might be good.
alternatively, addressREMOVE@NOSPAMdomain.com might work too.
that doesn't seem very professional. is there another way?
not really. they scan webpages for email addresses. you could only allow email addresses to be displayed to logged in users. that would effectively block out spiders. other than that, you're stuck with funky tricks like those.
just thought of another way
try this: email @ domain . com
That might fool them
scrapers are pretty intelligent. I think this would be easy for the to figure out. They'd just make a rule that searches for @ signs and take x words before it, and x words after it, and create a few email addresses out of educated combinations. They don't care if 90% of the email addresses they generate are bogus.
basically, what you need to do is think of a scheme thats original, hard for a program to parse, but easy for a human. doing the same thing as everyone else does will not work, if everybody started adopting the same email obfuscation rule (i.e. everyone did "myemail_at_NOSPAM_ezabel_com") the scraper programs would just incorporate a rule to check for that format.
you really think that they go to those great lengths to parse out obfuscated emails?