On 23 March 2011 15:33, sol.manager <[email protected]> wrote: > The problem seems to be that use was using Firebug add-on for Firefox > and was viewing the page in debug mode, so essentially he was seeing > the "front" and the "back" at the same time. Robots don't crawl the > front, the crawl the source. So in the end, I believe this was > operator error and not incorrect obfuscation of an email.
Really, don't even bother. Firstly, you're wrong in your assertion that "Robots don't crawl the front, they crawl the source" - nice simple robots may well only look at the source. But it's well known that the big search engines can determine if sneaky JS or CSS methods have been used to stuff keywords into source, but hide them from view. Secondly, you have no idea what *nasty* robots are doing - and I assume they're the ones you don't want getting the email addresses from your page (for spamming, etc). There's no reason not to assume that robots don't view your whole site exactly as users do, including ignoring robots.txt files - in fact, a robots.txt file is the first thing I would look at if I want to know where the juicy stuff might be... Just work under the premise that whatever works for your users will work for robots - if the user can click a mailto link, or read a legible email address, so can a robot, whatever obfuscation you've tried. In fact, rather than foiling robots, your method discriminates against real users who don't have JS-enabled browsers. If you *really* want to delay spammers, then render email addresses like "pavling(at)gmail(dot)com" - or some similar method that is deducible by humans, but unfamiliar enough to not be easily parsed by scripts (until loads of people use the method, and it's worth having the script look for matching patterns too...) - of course, users can no longer click-to-send, and I don't think it's worth the hassle. Life's too short - use a good spam filter, and don't worry about it. :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
