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Securing E-mail addresses

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MikeBrown
2004-12-01
2013-04-16
  • MikeBrown

    MikeBrown - 2004-12-01

    Are there any plans to make E-mails harder for spambots to detect by converting them to ascii-ordinal? Pretty much a requirement anymore for stuff open to the public.
    FG Guestbook does this but it is not as visually nice as flatPHP.  Its simple to do in Perl, I assume it is just as simple in PHP?

    Felix does it like this:

    sub convert_to_ord
      {
        my $text = $_[0];

        my $ctext = join ';&#', unpack('C*', $text);
        $ctext = "&#".$ctext.";";

        return $ctext;
      }

     
    • Thomas Hettenhausen

      Yes, I indeed planned to change the way they are handled, though I had planned on using a technique like the one in xbook.

      What the creator of that one did was to remove the @-sysmbol, and instead log where the symbol in the string was. After loading the page, he decodes it in the document tree, so the clickable links are functioning, but the sourcecode a bot gets does not include valid links.

      I wonder if the method of the FG Guestbook really prevents spambots from harvesting them, since it is a very simple way to encode the characters - on line of code in PHP would decode them (it is the same code that makes non Latin1 code appear as Greek symbols or whatever).

      Will think about whether I will put in something fast like that.

      -Thomas

       
    • deepriver

      deepriver - 2005-02-25

      Hi

      Perhaps do I have a quick solution to your problem: A few months ago I wrote some Javascript which encrypts/decrypts email adresses using a simple rotation algorithm which should be specific enough to protect against spam bots. It's available at

      http://www.zanshin-karate-do-ettlingen.de/kontakt/mails.js

      - Wanja
      Comments are in German, if you need I'll translate them.

      Disadvantage: the user needs to enable Javascript in his/her browser, otherwise it will not work.

       
    • Thomas Hettenhausen

      Yeah, javascript will be essential for something like this, anyway, or the mailto: link would not work properly (as in: open a new mail window with a still encrypted email address).

      I am German, btw ;)

       

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