difference between contact form and other methods of spam avoidance

  • oncidium

    (@oncidium)


    18 years, 9 months ago

    I have been searching the forum for posts related to avoiding spam bots by using various solutions. Can someone explain which method is the “best” depending on the application? So far the methods I found are contact forms and encoding the email address in ASCII text.

    Whatever the method, I don’t want bots/harvesters to be able to find out what the email address is. Or at least, try to prevent it using the “best” method.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Mark (podz)

    (@podz)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    If you use the WP Contact form (at http://www.wp-plugins.net) then your address is not on the page at all so it cannot be scraped or decoded in any way.

    isaacschlueter

    (@isaacschlueter)

    18 years, 9 months ago

    Yep. This is the only effective way to prevent harvesting.

    It’s pretty easy to write a program in VB that will create an Internet Explorer web browser control, and then have it spit out the documentElement.InnerHTML property to harvest for email addresses. (In fact, if one were to write an email-harvesting bot, this would be the easiest way to do it, imo.) The InnerHTML property exposes the document *after* it’s been parsed by the browser, so any method that a browser can see through (i.e., encoding your email with javascript or some such method) is going to expose your address to the harvesters.

    The only safe methods are using turing tests like
    pear-bob-apple@remove.the.fruits.yahoo.com (that’s kind of annoying, because someone must then edit the address in their email program, and once enough people use the same sort of thing, then the bots start getting wise to it) or a contact form that keeps your address hidden server-side.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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