Site design: Feedback and not spam

[Antoni Gual]

I'm doing a new site at lycos (the same dog with a new collar! )
I suspect spammers have recorded the e-mail address i put in my geocities site. How can I design my new site to allow users feedback and avoid showing my adress to spammers?

[Dav]

Here's an interesting page about that. I like the javascript solution:

Code:

document.write('<a href=\"mailto:'+a+'@'+b+'\">');

http://herniche.com/tools/hidden_email_address.htm

...

I know that with URL's, you can obscure them by doing the hex version of the characters, %20%64, etc... described here http://www.pc-help.org/obscure.htm ... but that wont work for emails.

...

BTW, Will you be doing an english version of your batch tips?

- Dav

[Antoni Gual]

Dav
Thanks for your suggestion, I'll try it. But i don't know if the email address in my page is the origin of spam. I deleted the address in all my pages last friday before leaving for week end. An today there was 71 e-mails in my box, 69 of them were spam...

About the batch tips, I wrote that three years ago, I forgot almost everything about them. And now I'm running W2000, so a half of the tips would not work. If you are interested there are plenty of pages in english about Dos Batch programming.

[Piptol]

Here's an interesting page about that. I like the javascript solution:

Code:

document.write('<a href=\"mailto:'+a+'@'+b+'\">');

http://herniche.com/tools/hidden_email_address.htm

Brilliant! I had been putting my addy as piptol"@"yahoo.com and hoping people had the sense to remove "". The script way im much better, I'll be sure to use it

Dav
Thanks for your suggestion, I'll try it. But i don't know if the email address in my page is the origin of spam. I deleted the address in all my pages last friday before leaving for week end. An today there was 71 e-mails in my box, 69 of them were spam...

Tsk, I know that one all too well. I've had to switch my main hotmail accout to 'exclusive' mode so i will only receive mail from people in my address book. it's not great though because i can't give my email address to people without me adding them first :-?

[Antoni Gual]

Searching the net i have found a simpler solution: Simply you put your e-mail adress in a gif image. Not so user friendly, but no spambot will ever find it.

[Dav]

A Gif. Heh...that will prevent spambots from wanting it.

There's another way that will remain user friendly and still hide your email from the spambots. Use the ASCII code in your html instead of letters.

My email (code_post@hotmail.com) looks like this when encoded that way.

NOTE: the only way I can post the encoded email here is to put in a space after every &. Remove the added spaces to make it work correctly.

Code:

& #99;& #111;& #100;& #101;& #95;& #112;& #111;& #115;& #116;& #64;& #104;& #111;& #116;& #109;& #97;& #105;& #108;& #46;& #99;& #111;& #109;

That code will show up as code_post@hotmail.com on the users screen and will work when used with the mailto: link too. And from what I've read, it will effectively prevent the spambots from grabbing it as an email.

I know you can easily write your own program, but here's the Qbasic program I used to encode my email above...

Code:

A$ = "code_post@hotmail.com"

b$ = ""
FOR i = 1 TO LEN(A$)
   b$ = b$ + "&#" + LTRIM$(STR$(ASC(MID$(A$, i, 1)))) + ";"
NEXT
PRINT b$

'Save it to a file if you want...
'OPEN "EMAILOUT.TXT" FOR OUTPUT AS 1
'PRINT #1, b$

- Dav

[wizardlife]

it's not great though because i can't give my email address to people without me adding them first :-?

I considered that, but it's really lousy if someone's trying to get ahold of you. I just use filters instead of blocking. The Hotmail filtering system is incredibly effective. I just block everything that comes from certain domains, and anything that has certain words in the subject line.

[Piptol]

I considered that, but it's really lousy if someone's trying to get ahold of you. I just use filters instead of blocking. The Hotmail filtering system is incredibly effective. I just block everything that comes from certain domains, and anything that has certain words in the subject line.

The filters are pretty good, problem for me is that I've had the same address for about 5 years, so even though the filter was stripping out 90% of the spam, I was still getting a fair few slipping through everyday. Just means I have to keep an eye on my junk mail folder for legit emails.. but so far it's working well.

[Antoni Gual]

You are filtering 90% of the spam???
I have 40 entries in the filters list and I hardly filter a 50%!![/quote]

[Strychnine]

I'm doing a new site at lycos (the same dog with a new collar! )
I suspect spammers have recorded the e-mail address i put in my geocities site. How can I design my new site to allow users feedback and avoid showing my adress to spammers?

PHP portal?

Option of registering users >> Option: Hide email address from others?

I don't know,

Its a good question though, I might make a php script for it when I have time 8)