Re: [Audacity-devel] web site hiding of email addresses

[Gale A. <ga...@au...>]

| From Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman <bu...@bu...> 
| Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:15:25 -0200
| Subject: [Audacity-devel] web site hiding of email addresses
> Vaughan Johnson wrote:
> | Strictly speaking, the obfuscator doesn't make it unextractable. It's
> | just re-encoding it so if one wrote a bot to be smart enough to decode
> | hex and decimal characters, they'd be recognizable as email addresses.
> | But probably most bots aren't that smart.
> 
> Actually, it's quite common that email harvesters URL-decode (typical 
> hex-encoding) the whole html source. The best, so far, is to use javascript
> to output the email address to js-enabled agents (i.e real browsers,
> USUALLY), or output images with some level of captcha-ness.
> 
> What I do? I just replace @ and . with things like [AT] and [DOT]... 
> with different kinds of variations.

Replacing characters that define email addresses with other ones is what 
I tend to in the Wiki too, but I'm not that keen on it because you still
have a minority of non-savvy users who take what is there literally and
then find it won't work as an email address. Generally I think mailto
links are better, if there is some additional security that can defeat
most of the bots.  

We could I suppose name the address, replacing @ with "_AT_" or 
whatever and explain what to do in hover text.  At any rate, the spam 
filters on the -feedback list are fairly good (the same as -help list
had with a few extras) and spam on the -help list was not a very 
significant problem, despite naming the list explicitly on the page.  


Gale