How to Block email bots

[davewray]

Hi! Well, wouldn't you know it...I get indexed today by google and already I have two spam email that was generated by someone using my "add a link" form. I know that there's a site out there that will allow you to input your real email address and it will return a series of numbers etcetera to hide your real email from these bots. Does anyone know which site allows you to do this for free? As well, does anyone know how I would incorporate the cloaked email address into my Matt's Script form text? Thanks in advance!

[jimbeetle]

Hey davwray,

There are quite a few e-mail address encoders. Some work differently than others so you should check out a few to see which is best for your use. Just do a google search for email address encoder, mailto encoder and the like and you should come up with a handful.

I've gotten away from email forms but I'm sure somebody else will tell you how to use it with Matt's script AND all the things you should do to secure the script from possible spammers.

Jim

[davewray]

Thanks a lot Jim! :) Anyone have the answer for how I incorporate the email encoder into Matt's Form Script? Thanks :)

[jimbeetle]

I forgot to suggest that you take a walk over to the spider identification forum [webmasterworld.com]. You'll find list of bots [webmasterworld.com], both good and bad and a lot of info on how to block them, whether through robots.txt, mod_rewrite or mod_access.

Well worth a visit.

[le_gber]

Davewray, I just changed my form handler script this week and found a script based on Matt's but 'apparently' more secure.

The good thing is that (in your case), you define a list of email address in the config section of the perl file as:
1=> [e-mail]
2=> [e-mail]
etc...

and what you do on the actual HTML page (where the form lies) is just set the recipient to whichever number you want it ie recipient =1,2,3)

It's really great.

Leo

[Oaf357]

I always use a server-side script to have people e-mail me. For example the PHP script I'm using on one site as a contact form does not display an e-mail address anywhere. Yet there is a link to the form on every page. Works quite nice and the bots can crawl it all they want, "NO E-MAIL ADDRESS FOR YOU!"