Form field spammers
March 22nd, 2006
I didn't want to put my email address on the site, purely for spam reasons. I thought I could avoid spam by putting a contact form on the site instead. Now, I get more spam than I used to from comment spam bots using my contact form!
There is no escape, and I will have to accept this as a part of my destiny...
Comments
1 . Dan Pitman at 2006-03-22T16:39:35.000Z
Hey Jesse,
When I was doing work on the Thrivecanada website, they asked me about reducing spam (as they need to have their email addresses on the site).
I found that if you use ascii code in place of the @ symbol, it seems to trick the spambots searching for addresses, but still works in a "mailto" link.
ie: <a href="mailto:danpitman@hotmail.com">
2 . Jesse Skinner at 2006-03-22T17:54:54.000Z
That's great, Dan. Though I wonder how long before they adapt the bots to factor this in...
It's become painfully impossible to distinguish between bots and humans.. besides using a CAPTCHA, I suppose. I think I'd rather deal with spam myself rather than put the work on my visitors. For now, anyway. Ask me in a few months...
3 . espd at 2006-03-24T21:43:20.000Z
Use the Enkoder. It works great. Encodes an email address so bots can't recognize it.
http://automaticlabs.com/products/enkoderform