How good are email-finding bots?

[Fat Tone]

An awful lot of my users get an awful lot of spam. One way they get on spam lists must be that they include their email addresses on their personal web pages - very desirable and essential in the academic world.

I wondered how much I would need to disguise an address to stop bots seeing it e.g. if I use 'user (@here.ac.uk)' would they still get it? I don't think I can go as far as 'user at here dot ac dot uk' but if I was writing a bot I'd get that too.

T.

[Taz]

They could use a repsonse form instead of listing their email address

[GNEP]

Same suggestion as Taz - use feedback forms where possible (just make sure there is some JS checking they input their email adress properly - ie it contains a "@" & "." for example). If they needed to actually print their email address on the page, (1) don't make it a mailto link (2) put some thin characters (eg |) in that are the same colour as the page background. Or extra spaces eg around the "@" sign.

That way spiders can't "lift" the address so easily, yet it is still readable on-screen (although copy/paste ceases to work of course).

[Fat Tone]

Those are all usefull (and thanks btw), but, apart from the contact form, are they really gonna slow any half-decent bot down? I suppose we assume it'll stop some of them, which is better than nothing.

We just started using Spam Assassin here, so that should have a big effect on spam. I'd rather not make things too awkward for our main audience...

T.

[Ribbit]

There was a report published a while ago covering this kind of thing. I think they found the most effective way to stop bots was simply to diguise the address thus:

tony_andrews at matroxusers dot com

I'll try to dig the report out later.

Edit: D'oh! Read before posting, Ribbit!

[Chris B]

Some people use little javascripts to "hide" the e-mail from mail bots. Don't know how well they work but it seems like an efficient and easy solution to me. What you'd so is make a little javescript that 'builds' your e-mail address on the page:

Check here: freewebmastertips

[Fat Tone]

Excellent idea! I think I'll go for that because its so easy and transparent. I'll rename the vars to something unrelated too.

Thanks,

T.

[Gurm]

Thought 1:

Make a small .gif with your e-mail address in any font you like. Paste where appropriate. Don't make it clickable. Heaven forbid people should have to TYPE.

Thought 2:

PHP and many other scripting languges have image generation algorithms. Use them to build a small script to build your e-mail address dynamically onscreen.

- Gurm

P.S. Well, ok thought #2 is a bit silly. But seriously, use thought #1.

[GNEP]

Good idea Gurm.

[VJ]

Originally posted by Gurm
Thought 1:

Make a small .gif with your e-mail address in any font you like. Paste where appropriate. Don't make it clickable. Heaven forbid people should have to TYPE.

Rats, I was about to post this ...

But I like the JavaScript idea !
(still allows copy/paste for the user)

Jörg

[shanebrooks]

embed the components of the email address in table cells. Readable on the screen and virtually unliftable.

<table><td>name</td><td>@</td><td>address</td><td>.</td><td>com</td></table>

[az]

combine Gurm's ore Shane's idea with the JavaScript one, so people can click if they want. If they have scripting disabled I'm afraid they'd have to type

AZ