Are you telling me that the spam bots aren't smart enough to detect
the supposedly hidden email address in the form but they are smart
enough to decode hex? If that's the case then the bots are reading
the rendered html & not the real source so if one uses an image to
click on to start a mailto: then a bot can't read that either ? So
bots can not read the source html. Hmmm, I thought bots were smarter
than that. Of course it depends on the bot. ;-)
At 04:23 PM 12/21/2005, Neil Atwood typed:
I rarely disagree with your take on matters technical Wayne, but I do here.
Well have a Merry Christmas anyway. ;-)
I have built and I currently maintain several dozen websites. Most
of them pretty simple jobs using a CMS to reduce the amount of hand
coding required. In every case I use NO email links at all. They all
use forms for the primary means of contact. In the 10 or so contacts
a day I get from those sites, I have had no complaints about using a
form, and - this is the important bit - NO spam on the addresses
those forms send to. Many of these sites have been up for 2-3 years.
I've used all the hex and JS tricks to 'hide' email addresses. Some
work better than others, but all of them ultimately fail and those
addresses will attract spam sooner or later. The spambots are
getting very sophisticated these days and these simple tricks are
not fooling them.
Then why do forms work? It's because of calling an external cgi or
perl script but the simplest forms don't use these & this is the same
technology that can be used to hide email addresses in html. It's not
that forms are more secure but that calling scripts is more secure
from bots. I wager that as much spam comes from not paying to have
ones domain hidden in whois.
You may not ever learn to love it, but learn to put up with the
form, for the moment it's here to stay... ;-)
I'm afraid you're correct but I'll keep resisting anyway & maybe it's
because of the school of hard knocks that I do.
----------+----------
Wayne D. Johnson
Ashland, OH, USA 44805
<http://www.wavijo.com>
