[What is a spambot? from http://www.turnstep.com/Spambot/info.html]
“A Spambot is a piece of software, a program that someone has written. Which language it was written in does not matter, but most are probably written in C for speed and portability reasons. A spambot should not be confused with regular robots, also known as spiders or web-crawlers.
“A spambot starts out on a web page. It scans the page for two things: hyperlinks and email addresses. It stores the email addresses to use as targets for spam, and follows each hyperlink to a new page, starting the process all over. Spambots also usually do not follow the guidelines in the robots.txt file, like civilized robots are supposed to. Most spambots are a part of a larger program, allowing them to send out the spam to email addresses as it find them. Others merely store the email addresses for later use.
“Spambots vary in their intelligence and sophistication, but even the smartest can be fairly easily fooled by the tricks on this site. The simplest spambot would simply find mailto links, and follow each hyperlink as it comes up, until it reaches a dead end. The smartest ones can recognize email addresses in many forms, recognize dead links, avoid certain types of email addresses (such as *.edu and *.gov) and track many pages at once.”
I have some [dohtml]<acronym title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</acronym>[/dohtml] techniques to add as well:
<ol type='1'><li>:Before or :After Technique <http://www.phoenity.com/newtedge/hide_email_spambots/>
Advantages<ol type='1'><li>Very clean</li><li>Not much code involved</li></ol>
Disadvantages<ol type='1'><li>Will be totally invisible without CSS support</li><li>Will not work in older browsers including IE</li><li>Gecko users can't select the text (Opera users can)</li></ol></li><li>STRONG within another element
This method wraps STRONG tags around everything but the letters of an e-mail address and then applies CSS that hides everything in those STRONG elements. Spambots should not be smart enough to figure this out.
Example for sale@c.com [Markup]
Code: Select all
<p id="_439373902183"><strong>Pick out the letter</strong>s<strong> </strong>a<strong>nd symbo</strong>l<strong>s that stand out in ord</strong>e<strong>r to get my </strong>@<strong> e-mail address, money, et</strong>c.<strong> with </strong>com<strong>mon stuff!</strong></p>[code]
[i]Example for sale@c.com [Rendered Markup][/i]
[dohtml]
<p><strong>Pick out the letter</strong>s<strong> </strong>a<strong>nd symbo</strong>l<strong>s that stand out in ord</strong>e<strong>r to get my </strong>@<strong> e-mail address, money, et</strong>c.<strong> with </strong>com<strong>mon stuff!</strong></p>
[/dohtml]
Why did I use STRONG instead of something like SPAN? If I used SPAN, there wouldn't be anything to tell the e-mail letters apart from anything else if the user agent didn't have CSS support.
[i]Example for sale@c.com [CSS][/i]
[code]
#_439373902183 strong {
display: none;
}[code]
[i]Example for sale@c.com [Finished Product][/i]
[dohtml]
<style type="text/css">
#_439373902183 strong {
display: none;
}
</style>
<p id="_439373902183"><strong>Pick out the letter</strong>s<strong> </strong>a<strong>nd symbo</strong>l<strong>s that stand out in ord</strong>e<strong>r to get my </strong>@<strong> e-mail address, money, et</strong>c.<strong> with </strong>com<strong>mon stuff!</strong></p>
[/dohtml]
[i]Advantages[/i]<ol type='1'><li>Very simple CSS that a wide variety of browsers can work with</li><li>Technique invisible to anyone who doesn't look at the source</li></ol>
[i]Disadvantages[/i]<ol type='1'><li>Will have problems using without CSS support</li><li>A lot of waste</li><li>Unsemantic</li></ol></li></ol>
[color=#888888][size=85]Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:2353, old post ID:19857[/size][/color]