[thelist] Hiveware email address encoder

rudy rudy937 at rogers.com
Fri Jul 25 18:08:43 CDT 2003


> I respectfully disagree. Your logic is akin to someone stealing a freshly
> baked pie, on someone's windowsill, and it's the baker's fault for leaving
> it out there in the first place!

despite the head lemur's suggestion that hiding the email address on a web
site using technology that some folks do not use is the wrong f*cking answer
(otherwise, it was a great post, one of the best today), i think the analogy
to stealing a pie is a bit off

so let me try again to explain my logic

we're all agreed on the need to publish an email address on a site, so that
potential customers (or whoever) can contact you

alles klar so far

we also want to do this in a very special way

if possible, we want to do it in a way that spambots will not pick it up,
but humans can still understand it, use it, and contact you

what the heck is so hard to understand about that?  it's a great objective

now just because a few humans have problems with whatever method you try to
achieve this objective, doesn't mean you just throw up your hands and say
"okay, i guess JOE AT ACME DOT COM is just too hard for absolutely everybody
to understand, i can get 99.9% comprehension, but since that's not 100%,
therefore let's give up and just focus our energies on filtering the
inevitable torrent of spam..."

sure, some methods use javascript (the one on my site included), and even
though some folks do not use javascript, that does not make it "the wrong
f*cking answer" because there's the NOSCRIPT tag that you should avail
yourself of!

and let's get one more thing straight

if you insist on using a mailto link, that will FOR SURE get picked up by
spambots

but using a mailto link is not the only way to communicate your email
address to your site visitors

joe at acme dot com is just one of the ways, and there are a hunnert
variations

yes, it is theoretically possible for spambots to parse the previous
sentence and figure out that there's an email address in there, but i kinda
doubt it, especially when you consider variations like

  joe <i>at</i> acme <i>dot</i> com

  joe a<!-- hoo! -->t acme d<!-- ha! -->ot com

all a spambot is is a **program** and i'm sure most of you have sufficient
experience in, or at least an understanding of, what's involved in
programming a routine that would be able to pick up an email address

let's pretend that a spambot is like a special camera that can only see
things in ultraviolet

ordinary honest people will see your pie on the windowsill and leave it
alone

spambots cannot see the pie because it doesn't glow in ultraviolet, to them
it's not even there

but if you insist on baking your pie with radioactive dough, so that it
glows in ultraviolet, then don't be surprised if a spambot comes along and
steals it

the answer:  don't use a mailto link, find some other way to communicate
your email address

for example, this is one situation where text-as-gif is a great idea


rudy



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