yes i love technology

Mailto Hyperlinks Stop Spam Bots!

June 28th, 2007 by Pete

Everyone hates spam, I hate it even more than most people. If you put an email address on a website, as a mailto hyperlink, then it's likely that spam bots will find this address and start sending annoying emails.

One way to get around this is to use a clever technique which I discovered over at SpamSpan.com. Instead of entering your email like a normal hyperlink use the code below:

HTML:
  1. <span class="spamspan">
  2. <span class="u">pete.graham</span> [at] <span class="d">domain-name.com</span>
  3. (<span class="t">Pete's Email Address</span>)
  4. </span>

A nifty piece of Javascript is then used to convert this html into a normal mailto hyperlink. Spam bots don't have Javascript enabled so wont register the link. If a visitor to your site have Javascript disabled they will see the link in the form below:
petegraham [at] domain-name.com (Pete's Email Address)

Email Spam Bot

# Pete Graham

Posted in Uncategorized, Website Development, spam | No Comments »

Death to Spammers!

April 12th, 2007 by Pete

I've starting getting lots of Spam comments on my blogs recently. This was becoming increasing annoying because each time someone comments on my blog I get sent an email. Not only were the comments sections, on some of my articles, full of viagra advertisements but my inbox was also full of notification about these comments.

I decided to install the Spam Karma plug-in in an effort to thwart the irritating bots that were making these comments. Since installing it (about 2 weeks ago) I think it has successfully caught each spam post to this site, and set it for moderation. It rarely seems to identify real comments as spam (let me know if one of your comments goes missing). As a Spam prevention plugin it works very well.

Spam Karma is incredibly configurable, the downside of this is its interface isn't very intuitive. It does appear to have some options for moderating your existing comments, but after having very limited success with this I decided to delete the offending comments manually. This is just a small complaint thought and if you do start getting Spammed on your Wordpress blog then I would suggest installing this plug-in ASAP.

Can of Lovely Spam

# Pete Graham

Posted in Uncategorized, wordpress, spam, plug-ins | No Comments »