gogogadgetearl

2007.11.07

• most of you probably don't know this, but for quite a few years now, i've been protecting your email addresses from spambots -- well...those of you who have registered and commented anyway...
  
  a long time ago i was reading about how easy it was to scan a page and "harvest" all the email addresses from that page.  i thought to myself, "that sucks, i don't want spam bots getting my email address - and i bet the people who visit my site don't either."  so i did some research and discovered some javascript that will take an obfuscated email address and "unmunge" it.
  
  so, i've created a php function in my wordpress theme that obfuscates every email address it writes to the page and then the javascript will load in your browser, scan the page, and deobfuscate it.  for example, if your email was 'you@domain.com', then the php function would obfuscate it by replacing the punctuation and throwing in some buzz words like this: 'not_you_remove-this_at_nowhere_domain_dot_com_buzz'.  then the javascript scans the page and corrects all the email addresses by removing all the buzz words.  i have created some custom buzz words in both scripts so 99.9% of all spam bots won't be able to figure out the pattern.
  
  since the spambots only scan the source code, the javascript never runs in a browser, so they only harvest obfuscated and useless strings.
  
  i hope this makes you guys feel a little more comfortable when you leave a comment.  :-)