Comments on: Spammers Beware! We’ve got your number (for now) http://blog.superuser.com/2011/01/25/spammers-beware-weve-got-your-number-for-now/ The Super User Community Blog Mon, 05 Dec 2016 07:34:06 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.6 By: Alec S. http://blog.superuser.com/2011/01/25/spammers-beware-weve-got-your-number-for-now/#comment-5 Tue, 15 Mar 2011 02:04:44 +0000 http://superuser.blogoverflow.com/?p=285#comment-5 I am shocked I tell you, shocked! I never would have imagined that using the words ‘at’ and ‘dot’ would work so effectively, considering how incredibly trivial it is to write a regex to catch it. Shocked!

I like how ROT13 works so well, since it looks like a normal, un-obfuscated email address to a dumb bot, so it tries to spam an invalid address (or discards it if it’s smart enough—which we just established that it’s not).

I’m confused by the discrepancy between the effectiveness of the “CSS Display” and “HTML Comments” methods. They are basically the same thing (they look alike when viewing the code), just using different tags, but one works and the other doesn’t? I can only assume that the harvesters are discarding comment tags.

Until bots are able to harvest rendered HTML instead of just the code, I’ll be using the CSS tricks. They are particularly nice because they not only allow the user to view the address without needing to decode it, but also make it simple enough for the author to insert the address with little work, unlike some methods like the JavaScript one.

Shocked.

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