Beating The Spambots Searching Your Blog

Many years ago a large part of my job was teaching the trainers in my area to teach. Near the start of each course I would show a flipchart with the words:

"Eschew Obfuscation"

written large. These words immediately did what I was telling them not to do. That is; avoid confusing your trainees by using long obscure technical words or the jargon you have become accustomed to using amongst your colleagues. However, it did make them sit up and pay attention.

(You can find the dictionary definitions of eschew and obfuscation and hear how they are pronounced here.)

Now I am going to tell you to do the opposite if you want to allow your readers to contact you by email. As you can see I have added a contact link in the sidebar so that any one who wants to can email me.

Now, some of you are possibly thinking that I have gone daft (sometimes I think I have) because I have just opened myself to the spambots which regularly search the Web. But, if you look at the source code you will not find my email address sitting there in the XHTML. It has been obfuscated.

You are probably like me and think that those who program and use spambots so that they can spam you are evil demons from a hell dimension (oops! Buffy fan showing there). Because of this you have made sure that you do not supply any contact details and just rely on the comments system. Even comments can attract a lot of spam comments if you don’t moderate them.

I think that if you are going to join the blogosphere then you should join it properly. And that means enabling others to contact you and exchange ideas. One way is through social networking sites and another is through email. That is, through email that is protected from spambots and the spammers who use them.

There are several way to do this and many posts have been written about it. Here are a few:

Many methods rely on presenting the email address in a plain text form with extra characters which should be left out when entering the address in the email client. Another is to spell out the @ symbol and the dot (hoppyateasterbunnydotnet). The problem with these is that many people are not very computer savvy and they will click away at them with no result then give up.

Another method is to show your email address as a graphic icon which the spambots will not be able to read. Again the problem is that your reader has to copy your address from the graphic. Despite your telling them to copy the address they will click away at the graphic and give up when nothing happens.

It can take a long time to produce icons using a graphics or photo editing program but, there is a simple solution. Both of the above icons were obtained from the e-mail icon generator at Nexodyne. Here you can either generate a pre-defined icon for a long list of email providers or, as I have done customise the icons to match your blog template or web site design or to make them stand out.

My preferred method is to use an email obfuscator, which generates JavaScript code which you can insert into your template. This means that you will have a clickable mailto: link to open your email client ready for your message. Some will give you the choice of generating your code in HTML.

In my case I simply added the JavaScript generated by the email scrambler at blogflux to the sidebar by using another HTML/JavaScript gadget.

There are also a few other obfuscators or scramblers:

If you browse around I am sure that you will find more tools to help make your email address safe. Hopefully, this will have been of some help to you.

Oh! In case you are tempted to try sending him an email there may be a Hoppy somewhere but there is no easterbunny.net.