Forum Moderators: open
Markus
I don't think using PHP for the email helps, because the file is created on the server and sent to the browser with the email in full view
Try this one. In the example below the user fills in a form, the entries are posted to a "thankyou" page which has a .php extension. The email is generated by php before the page is served to the user.
<form method="POST" action="thankyou-page.php">
<textarea rows="6" name="message" cols="60"></textarea>
Name : <input typ="text" size="35" name="name" />
You may leave your name and e-mail address if you wish:
E-mail address : <input typ="text" size="35" name="email" />
<input type="submit" value="Send" name="send" />
</form>
On thankyou-page.php
<?php
$email = $HTTP_POST_VARS[email];
if (!$email) $email = "user@domain.com";
$mailto = "owner@domain.com";
$mailsubj = "User contact";
$mailhead = "From: $email\n";
$mailbody = $HTTP_POST_VARS[message];
if ($name) {
$mailbody .= "\n\n";
$mailbody .= "From: $name\n";
}
mail($mailto, $mailsubj, $mailbody, $mailhead);
?>
Harry
In other words, the user would have to fill out a form and then your address will be emailed to them. I like the idea that they have to provide a real address or they won't receive your address, athough I'm not happy with the extra effort and time required of the customer. I want people to be able to contact me easily.
But that's not what I see on second look. It looks as though you're simply allowing them to contact you via a "contact us" form. What if they want to use their own email client? You're not going to give them your address? Yes, that works, but it's got some drawbacks, from a psychological/marketing perspective.
[Whew, we're now way off topic. Maybe a mod could transfer these posts?...]
It goes against the grain of the trend for transparency in business and maybe in all aspects of contemporary life. By that I mean that many businesses will need to be concerned about the appearance of credibility. It may be important to their customers that the site post their phone number, street address, and email address on the site.
Yes, it's just a "contact us" form. The user never sees the address, nor is it available on the site where it could be scavenged by a bot. Of course it's not foolproof as any intelligent human or software can easily convert a domain name into an email address.
I agree for a commercial site this may not be suitable. Even for my own site I am torn between privacy and openness to the user. In fact I get so much spam anyway I doubt whether it makes any difference. :(
Harry
EH No ...turns out that google is just lying ..its not caching me at all ...its in fact displaying my pages live inside its supposedly "cached" area (just like any other framed pageset )...If I go to googles "cache" and then quickly go to my logs "latest visitors"
its easy to see ( me 'n' google just dropped by!)...
Now the question is this...
are they doing this because of copyright issues ...
Under the "Berne conventions" only educational establishments are allowed to store copyright material in any way ..and that only in severely limited amounts ..And no way is google or any other major search engine an educational institution ( might have been once.. but not now guys ..now your're all just breaking the law every where! )
"Caching" me and probably you ( you'd need to be running this kind of script to notice )
gets them round this nicely ...still not legal in other respects ..but ..
However it's ruinous on bandwidth ...cos every time on of my competitors looks at what google call their "cache" ..I pay the call ..!
Neat way to force someone right out of business using google cache as the middle man?
So apparently the choice is ..either accept copyright infringement ( if you didn't ask to be spidered )..or become the "unwitting paying provider" of someone elses "cache" service..
BTW ..someone is bound to be thinking what about robots .txt ...the point is under ALL international copyright laws ...the "copier" or "cacher" or "non educational search engine" must have your handwritten permission to do anything with your material ...also "public domain " does not apply ...ask any judge ..( private paid for server )
Does anyone think you have to put up a "no burglars" sign to make breakins illegal?
Sorry this one is so long ...but I do think it merits serious discussion ..
This was done because I wanted to be able to run a slide show with forward and backward buttons without having to go to the server each time they clicked a button (unless they hadn't downloaded the image yet). Getting it to work in Netscape 4 was a bear. Now that I no longer support that browser, it would probably be much easier.
Anyway, the method was pretty complex and because of the javascript-turned-off-issue I was thinking about redoing it in php, but now that you've mentioned this copyright issue, I'm going to have to reconsider my reconsidering!
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
Problem solved.
If this gets past the moderator I can already hear the screams in the boardrooms of search engines every where ..."**** guys!.. someone added two and two and there went the free lunch we've all had!"
Ps .I wondered about this one years ago and started writing about it when elsewhere someone said "why do we think the search engines owe us a living " ...He got it so wrong ....They live by us not complaining when they steal whats our property ..for how long?
That's a very interesting argument, but I'm not convinced.
The problem with the idea is that average Web site owner is happy if Google caches their pages and images.
To a some degree what's illegal is socially-defined. For most of us, it's a mutually beneficial "theft," if that's what it is.
Your not wanting the images cached puts you in a very small minority. For the convenience and benefit of the majority, it seems like a small matter to add the code E suggested to your site. If that works (to prevent Google from caching your files) then there's no problem, is there?
The bottom line is that there would be a heck of a lot more people screaming if some government said Google was burglaring compared to the extremely infrequent complaints we hear now.
Seriously, this is unenforcable over-the-top paranoid garbage. You'll be suing somebody for printing your page next! And you wonder why the American legal system is the laughing stock of the world?
At the end of the day, if you don't want somebody to store/read/admire/cache/share your content, then don't put it on the public internet. Problem solved. Not that anybody would want to, but you're never gonna get a law like that.
1. Already is a law all over the world ...
2.I am not in the states ...
3. The internet is not public ..neither is my server .
4. Thanks to the Moderators here ..I know it's severely off topic ...
5. Richard.... Not looking to get on your case here but normally one should make sure that one knows what one is talking about prior to posting on a specialist subject ... go search copyright ...with any search engine ..
Moderators I promise that dont want to be running this subject here but I heve had "thread start refused" elsewhere ...Subject to hot to handle?
I use javascript for my contact info which I have set up as text in a gif image so the bots can't grab my email. The search engines do not cache the gif with my email or the images that are using the javascript. I have scrolling image galleries set up with javascript. They currently only cache what is sitting on the page when they crawl which is only the tiny thumbnails.
Let's not rehash this entire discussion:
[webmasterworld.com...]
The beauty of this for me was that I can add one line of data to one file and the images are available on the thumbnail page and the full-size pages.
Now, it wasn't my intention to hide them from Google. Maybe I should redo the code so the thumbnails are available.
I personally surf with JavaScript on, and don't believe in turning it off unless I know I am entering sites that might use flaws in security regarding JavaScript, however just disabling ActiveX can help with this issue.
In the design of my sites I try to use as little JavaScript as possible, and aim to have sites accessible to users without it on. I think of JavaScript as an additional element, rather than a required one. It is a very useful scripting language, however due to the frequent unfortunate use of it in manners which are annoying, etc and the fact people do disable it because of this I don't believe it can be relied upon for any major element of a site. While saying this I realise that there are some instances where people may decide you must have JavaScript on to be able to use an additional feature, such as a Chat Room, and agree that that is ok.
And now to the current topic.
Whilst I do not have an extensive knowledge of copyright laws and there international acceptance I personally do not think that by caching a copy of a site Google is infringing it. And if it is technically infringing copyright I would be very disappointed if anyone ever decided to sue Google for this, especially as you can easily customize what the GoogleBot does at your site as well as remove your site from Google at any time. Unnecessary litigation has gone way too far - and as Google is doing in my mind a great lot of good, it would be a shame for a minor disagreement like that to ruin it for everyone else.
And to the comment regarding "public internet" by R1chard. My interpretation of that comment is not that the entire internet is public, rather to the area of it which is publicly accessible.
It is a publicly accessible resource of information. Of course, there are private areas of the internet secured with usernames/passwords and so on, and much, if not most, of the content available is copyrighted, but you must have security in place to be able to not call your online content public.
1) Using javascript for any kind of protection or security is just plain stupid. You are relying on somthing that isn't fixed: many people surf with javascript restricted or even disabled entirely. Not because they wanted it, but because js isn't an option. Screen reader, mobile phones, etc don't have javascript.
If you are using javascript, make sure that the site is perfectly usable for clients without javascript enabled. Then, you apply the javascript. See: [digital-web.com...]
There are far better ways to protect your images (like using a .htaccess to deny accessing pics from other domains), but remember this: when someone visits your page, it needs to download something to view it. If I want to see a picture, the picture needs to be fully downloaded into my cache folder before I see anything. That means, if I ever want to use your pic, I just search for it in my cache folder.
If you put something on the internet, it is not safe!
On topic:
I usually surf with javascript on, because most of the sites use javascript rollovers.... I restrict any intrusing form though. Any popup will be blocked, new windows will always be opened in another tab, and js cannot access any window-specific option (like moveTo() or window dimensions).
Also, remember that if someone wants to get something that is public, they will. Doesn't matter if it is streamed from the site, there are programs to catch this.
When it comes to JavaScript and images, and just image protection in general. Not sure how many people have realised that you can just screenshot images, although this is equivilent to photographing and is illegal as it breaches copyright, but I was just stating that as a technical method.
(Let me be clear that I don't know the law well, and I realize that law is often not about common sense.)
Just because a law written for print media could easily apply to digital media, doesn't necessarily mean it should.
Why? To some degree the problem is that enforcement becomes much harder with digital media, and what is possible and likely is much different.
What would a reasonable person say? Would a reasonable person consider it wrong to cache an image from a Website on their computer? Well, everyone of us is doing it--even Leosghost unless he's changed his browser defaults. It's not just search engines!
Wouldn't "reasonable people" (legal sense) say this normal? So is the law going to protect the content owner from browser or search engine caching? That's very hard to imagine.
It's much simpler if digital content owners change their methods to deal with the new risks. The fundamental decision is whether to open yourself to caching of any kind. If you don't want others to cache your content, you simply shouldn't post it online. It seems a little late to be trying to rethink how the Web works.
And Leosghost's JavaScript sounds like a good partial solution. I'd be interested in seeing how it works! Even if it's not a total solution, if it discourages some from stealing his images, that's something.
I'm gonna get "snipped" ...I can hear the scissors ...
"Z" ...sticky me ...
Moderators ..should this go to new thread ( and I know there were others that discussed this but they are old and were not being posted to by people with first hand legal knowledge ...
Albiet most of the posters did get the law right ..
Then post a message to this thread saying "Off-topic discussion continued at <URL of new thread>"
Regardless of what is law or not, I was talking about practical situations with normal people in the real world. Anything on a part of your server that is publically accessible, is just that: publically accessible. You've set the settings (a nontrivial matter than not everybody can/wants to do), so you have to live with it.
Specifically your comment that 'even showing your URL and a "snippet" description in their results is illegal...' just really got up my nose. Not only would most sites lose 70% of their traffic if this was the case, but what about the logical continuation of this? Am I allowed to review your site and include that review in a magazine? How about describe your site to somebody over the phone? Am I allowed to reveal what your site is about if somebody gives me the URL and asks?
So getting back on topic, yes there are people who don't have JavaScript enabled, either through choice or throuigh necessity (aside from the autodialer-fearers, another example is PalmPilot and cellphone users). So I would say that most of the time, JavaScript is best suited to trivial eye-candy and bonus applications.
I have a page on my personal web site which, when you visit it, will place a file in the startup group on your computer, and when you next reboot, it will flash a hello message on your screen. I could do worse.......it's to show who is running an unsecured or un-patched computer. It won't work on most systems now, but about 4 years ago it was quite a bit of fun.
I have a JS that runs in a hidden iframe that will play with the jar files on your computer as well. That one was fun.
Shadows Papa
(former corporate anti-virus admin for a major financial/insurance company and Symantec tech advisor)
