[storrier]

Hello everyone,
This is my first post on DIC - I hope I have the right forum.
For quite some time now, I have had all the email addresses on my site "hidden" (I thought) from spam bots - I somewhere read that changing the '@' symbol to - &, [followed with] #64; - in the HTML code would 'hide' the address from robots.
I am getting so much spam recently, I am beginning to think it simply isn't working - maybe never has, or the robots are 'on to it' now!? I can't imagine the spam is a left-over from times before the code was changed.
Can someone tell me - does the above code really work? I have an email form on my main contact page, however I also have a number of my students' address on the site and I can't really do the same for all of them.
Any help much appreciated.
I don't really want to use the system where the user has to type some special code before they can send email.
Thanks,
Greg B.

[crazyjugglerdrummer]

A simple solution when giving out your email is to say me[at]domain.com or make an image containing the text. Humans can get the email adress, but bots can't. Server side programming is often used to make secure email stuff, where you fill out a form and it gets sent to the recipient without your email ever being in the document.

and welcome to DIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This post has been edited by crazyjugglerdrummer: 29 May 2009 - 07:10 PM

[AnimusImmodicus]

Welcome to Dream in Code. I'm not entirely sure, perhaps I'm overly paranoid, but I would suspect that spam bots are made to recognize things such as email[at]domain.com. Some people even use email[at]domain[dot]com and I still suspect this doesn't fully work. emailatdomain.com might work a little better but a computer could still parse for at and then just dispose of the email address if it was parsed in correctly for instance tophatatgmail.com.

Like crazy said though, server side programming will properly hide the email address. But if that isn't for you I would at least try to further obfuscate the email address. For instance email[insertat}gmail{insertdot]com. Even this would not be fully save though because any time an email is posted publicly on a page someone could always submit it to the spam bots manually to be a jerk.

I hope this helps.

[searockruz]

i hope this helps you