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How to Protect Email Addresses in Textarea Fields From Harvesters and Spammers------------------------------------------------------ by Ralph Tegtmeier ------------------------------------------------------ Obfuscating web site email addresses by using Unicode is a nice and - at least currently - pretty efficient trick. Unfortunately, it won't work very well if you're presenting some preformatted text in a textarea field: your human visitors would not be able to recognize the address for what it is. However, here's a neat work around. Provided your web server set up allows for Server Side Includes (SSI), encapsulate your textarea file like this: You can either include an external file (as in our example above), or simply put your body text between the initial and the "endif" tag, in which case you can omit the "include file" reference. This will prevent the harvest bots listed above by UserAgent from scanning your file and any email content it may feature. Should you detect further UserAgents related to email harvesters, simply add them to the list above, delimiting them with the pipe symbol (|). This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below: Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services. He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com (c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com All rights reserved. Downloaded at: < http://fantomaster.com/ > © 2004 HostWrap.com , All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication or publication of any materials from this Site is expressly prohibited. |
