Stop Spam!
Anyone with a blog that has an e-mail address has probably noticed and increasing amount of spam arriving over time. One way to stop it is by encoding your e-mail address in numerical equivalents and wrapping the results in Javascript. Rather then figuring out all the numerical equivalents yourself, you can just head on over to the Hivelogic JavaScript Email Address Encoder. For more information on stopping spam, head on over and read A List Apart: Win the Spam Arms Race.
May 24th, 2002 at 12:58 pm
Thanks girlie!
I had one a few weeks ago, but I keep on getting “Viagara” kind of ads. Lucky me!
May 24th, 2002 at 5:48 pm
even though I already posted this in Christine’s comments, I’m pasting it here for an alternative too!
The problem with their hivelogic email encoder is that it puts it in javascript. For the people surfing w/JS off, they won’t see your email address, will then?
I’m trying to convert all the links over on my pages to this format because I get SO much spam!!!
So here’s my solution - the Email Obfuscator at Bonni’s site. It does a similar thing but w/o the JS part
May 24th, 2002 at 6:41 pm
I’ve been using one of those programs for a long time, and rarely get much spam.
The one I’ve been using most recently is here:
http://zamok.crans.org/~raffo/antispam/aem/
(always nice to have more than one link, in case one goes down, right)?
May 24th, 2002 at 9:37 pm
You have to be careful with that though. For instance, at my old site, I had my addy set up with ascii, but on the page it still displayed as the real address. And how did Google choose to cache it? Thanks a lot.
Now I write my address like row at rowf dot net. I think people are clever enough to figure that out, and I don’t think spambots pick up on it.
May 24th, 2002 at 9:42 pm
When I used it I didn’t use an e-mail address for the link text, I set that to something like “E-mail me” so that I didn’t have that problem. It’s a good thing to note though.
May 25th, 2002 at 9:08 am
Gaile, thanks - I hadn’t seen that one before
Row, the bad thing about that is that if you are making a page that you really want people to be able to contact you (ie, a business site), making it harder by not giving an address could be bad for business.
Even thought google’s cache still displays that address, I *think* the point was that bots are searching through the html code, and when it doesn’t find the combination of @ and . that it is looking for, it doesn’t really find the email address. BUT, I’m really no expert on this, this is just what I’ve thought to be the case in the last months since I found these tools to mask the addresses
What do you think?
May 25th, 2002 at 1:11 pm
I’ve taken a couple of different tactics on this. One is to display email messages like this: comments @ domesticat . net.
If a user can’t figure THAT out, I’m not terribly sure I want to talk to them….
Really, though, I’ve had the most success with just creating spamdrop addresses. My comments@domesticat.net address is a spamdrop, as is my domesticat@hotmail.com address. I have other addresses at domesticat.net, and those are only given to humans.
My rule: I only give my real address out to people whom I feel comfortable harassing. Period. It means that ONLY friends, family, and the occasional ‘net correspondent get my real address. That, and some pretty stringent spam filters (I worship SpamAssassin) take care of the rest.
May 25th, 2002 at 10:47 pm
I’m hassling my ISP to install SpamAssassin. I don’t even use my ISP address except for the very important stuff and I’m still getting spam.
I think if you used that masking code on the address and had it set to say something like ‘email me’, that should be fine, but the site Kristine linked to displays the address by default.
And this time round, I’m not having a catch-all. I think that will make a difference.