11 replies to this topic

[Vswe]

I've seen Jordan using some special ways to write his email to avoid bots fetching his email and then when I wrote my email address to Guest to receive a Google wave invite I got an idea, wouldn't it be possible to use some BB code to avoid the bots, for example if I want to write my own email address couldn't I just do it like this:

[noparse]
vidarswenning@hotmail

.com
[/noparse]

which would give me the output:

vidarswenning@hotmail

.com


What do you think, would this prevent bots for fetching your email address and put it in spam lists? Leave a comment below with your opinion.

[WingedPanther]

Bad news for you: it appears to be rendering as plain text.

[Vswe]

Yeah that was the point, but doesn't bots usually only read the source code and it would be [noparse]vi[b][/b]darsw[color="Black"][/color]enning[size="7"][/size]@[i][/i]hotmail[left][/left].com[/noparse]

or have I understood it wrong?

[WingedPanther]

Do a view source on the above to see what was actually generated.

[Vswe]

Oh ok, I got it, it was just an idea :D

[xXHalfSliceXx]

CHXO email address to image converter

[BlaineSch]

Well honestly it all depends on how smart the bot is and what exactly it is looking for. If I was just trying to find a ton of email addresses I might just find the exact format name@domain.com or name@domain.co.uk or something. But anybody could do a more advanced regular expression on a web page to find email addresses like name at domain dot com.

Images are probably the safest but even with a smart bot since the text is very simple could still in theory be found. Since gmail has wonderful abilities I try to mix it up everytime

name@gmail.com
n.ame@gmail.com
n.a.m.e@gmail.com
name+one@gmail.com

All those go to the same email, if you keep mixing it up you could eventually just block one if the spam gets too horrible on that name.

[BlaineSch]

Jordan said:

vidarswenning@hotmail

.com

I suppose, because you didn't have any text between the bbcode it is just stripped out. If you put text between it, it would probably work and there would be html tags in the email address.

vidarswenning@hotmail

.com

What if the web bot stripped all HTML tags etc before it did a regex on it to find email addresses?

[Guest]

You just posted exactly what I was going to say. I guess I was too late.

[WingedPanther]

Isn't it sad when the power of RegEx's are used for evil?