Anti-Email Spam (email bot obsfucator)
| Download: | anti-email-spam.zip |
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| Version: | 1.3 |
| Updated: | March 17, 2008 |
| Size: | 853 bytes |
Support This Plugin!While this software is being provided free to use, it takes considerable time to develop and support. If you do find it particularly useful or want to request a feature then consider donating money as an incentive for me to carry on developing it. Thanks! |
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This is a very simple plugin that attempts to hide email addresses from 'bots (computer email harvesting programs). Why would you want to do this? Because these nasty little harvesting programs are used by equally nasty little spammers. They scour websites looking for email addresses, which are then added to their spam list.
All the plugin does is replace any email addresses in your posts and pages with an obsfucated version. Two types of obsfucation are available:
- Entity encoding - this encodes the email address as HTML entities, making it invisible to most harvesting software
- JavaScript encoding - the email is encoded as a short piece of inline JavaScript code
So which is best for you? Well, it depends. I've seen reports of smart spammers decoding entities and successfully extracting email addresses. However, this method will work on all browsers, regardless of JavaScript. On the other hand, spammers have not yet, as far as I'm aware, implemented JavaScript in their programs, so the JavaScript version should be 'untouchable'. This is at the expense of emails being invisible to non-JavaScript enabled browsers.
The choice is yours.
After obsfucation the email address is wrapped in a mailto:, allowing viewers easy email access (while still stopping the 'bots).
Installation
- Download anti-email-spam.zip
- Unzip
- Change obsfucation, if necessary (see below)
- Upload antiemailspam.php to
/wp-content/plugins - Enable plugin from Plugin administration
You can find full details of installing a plugin on the plugin installation page.
Configuration
Configuration is extremely simple. You can change the type of email obsfucation by editing the antiemailspam.php file and commenting/uncommenting the appropriate line:
//$anti_callback = "anti_callback_entity"; $anti_callback = "anti_callback_js";
JavaScript obsfucation is enabled by default. To swap to entity encoding the code should look like this:
$anti_callback = "anti_callback_entity"; //$anti_callback = "anti_callback_js";
NOTE: email addresses already inside a mailto: are ignored.
Comments (page 2 of 2)
Apr 6, 2008 5:06 pm
Hi John,
Thanks for the great plugin.
Is it possible to add a decision to the code such that depending on the browser javascript status, either javascript or entity encoding is used.
Seems this would be the ideal way to address the problem, giving the maximum solution most of the time (javascript) and still providing for non-javascript browsers.
Apr 3, 2008 7:38 pm
John, never mind, I just figured it out: the e-mail address needs to be written in clear text, not as a link. In other words: just type your e-mail address in the visual panel of the WP editor and don't freak out. Once your posting/page is published, go and check the source code of the page - you can just search for the @-sign. It won't be there.
I mention this here in detail for other newbies like me -- maybe you could add this piece of info to your description/instructions, John? Not everybody who simply USES blogs knows all the intricate workings of all the used programming languages. I looked around online and found quite a few people who things a plugin doesn't work if you don't see the result immediately inside the WP editor!
Oh, one last thing: you have above this comment box a list of XHTML tags which I'm supposed to be able to use in here, when writing a comment. However, it doesn't work! Nothing get's formatted correctly. And, as some other folks before me mentioned: the code-tags don't turn the text into code; they highlight it, but that's all, the code entered is still interpreted. Maybe you'd like to look into that? Hope I could help!
Apr 3, 2008 4:02 am
John, would you mind explaining how I have to code my e-mail so your plugin will recognize it? I've only been working with Wordpress since December and haven't launched my private blog yet (want to get it safe first). Maybe there's something I'm missing?
I understand that I'm not supposed to write my e-mail like this:
write meBut when I leave out the mailto-part, my e-mail address gets attached to the path of the specific post that contains the e-mail address. Like this:
http://my.domain.net/year/month/day/post-slug/me@mail.netAny help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Mar 25, 2008 11:09 am
Nice plugin. Are you taking feature requests?
I noticed that the plugin does not look at the href attribute. It seems that links such as
[a href="mailto:user@domain.com"]user name[/a]would be just as important to consider when trying to prevent harvesters.
Mar 17, 2008 8:41 am
Changed
Mar 12, 2008 3:28 pm
This plugin was breaking for me with wordpress 2.3.4 because it was running before the default wordpress auto-formatting filters. Then the wordpress filters would alter the javascript code making it generate javascript errors.
Changing the anti_email_spam filter to run last fixed it for me
Just add the 99 in the filter code to get it to run after all other filters.
add_filter ('the_content', 'anti_email_spam',99);
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