Sandra.
Not true. Spiders that gather the email address look at the source of a
page. The HTML source code is text just like the rest of the page.
There is code that you can add to a page to keep spiders from accessing
it. It would be up in the Header section. There are a number of sites
that talk about this so I'm not going to tax my brain and try and
remember what they commands are but the problem is that this also keeps
indexing spiders from finding the page. I'm also not sure if some of
these spambots haven't figured a way around that code so the best way at
present is to use some type of graphic for either the whole email
address or at least a part of it.
If everyone uses the same procedure to hide their email addresses
including the java script previously mentioned, someone will find a way
around it. Using a combination of both seems liek the best route and is
why I chose only to replace the "@" sign.
I am a retired programmer and I don't see a way that someone could
reliably write code to differentiate a partial email address with a
graphic as a valid address. The bots are looking for something to alert
them to code that might be an address. Starting a link with "Mailto:" is
a good example. Looking for any instance of "@" is another. These things
are automated and they are only as smart as the programmer wants them to
be. Perhaps the next step for them to overcome graphics is to use an OCR
program that could interpret the text from the graphic itself. This
would be a lot slower but then again computers are becoming obscenely
fast and this might be the logical next step in the spammers evolution.
All we can hope is to try and stay a little bit ahead of the game and
hope that the government can help in some way like they did with the
national do not call list (which is really not working but is a
discussion for another list).
Denny Shirer - drdx(a)neo.rr.com - Canton, OH
Shirer Family Genealogy -
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~mysong
Muskingum County, OHGenWeb -
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ohmuskin/
Sandra Quinn wrote:
If you hide the email address in the htlm code they don't catch
them.
Sandy