UseBB Community

I'm trying to scramble email when posting a topic with HTML, but when I click OK it becomes unscrambled and is stored as plain text.

However, should I even worry about it? Or will the email be stored in the database and unavailable for harvesting by robots anyway?

I'm lost here!

Thanks,
Leo

Zevrix Solutions
http://zevrix.com

What do you mean with "scrambling"?

Dietrich here is an example...
http://www.golivecentral.com/pages/scramble.shtml

If you mean converting it to entities...

I tried this here and on my local sources and it "works", in the sense that the entities are being retained. But, only if you are posting it directly. If you perform a preview or edit (and the posted text gets in the text area) the entities won't be shown again but shown as the characters they represent.

This could be solved by escaping them when shown in a text area, and not escape them when shown elsewhere, BUT this gives huge problems with other character sets.

Quite a lot of people are using UseBB in its default language and encoding to post messages with other character sets, i.e. Russian, Chinese etc and this depends on the entities always being shown as the characters they represent. (You see, browsers send entities when the text sent has a different encoding than the page's.) Which is ofcourse the opposite behaviour as what you expect when using the text area.

Thus I'm afraid I can't really fix this except for adding a checkbox saying the entities must be escaped, which would be something 90% of users will not understand.

This is just another issue with the entities usage and the different character sets that will be fixed with v2 when everything (hopefully) will use UTF-8.

Thanks for the detailed explanations, Dietrich. (And for the great software, btw. I probably checked some 20 other PHP forums, yours was the last one and the only one I really liked).

I'm still trying to understand: should I worry about posting email addresses on the forum? Can they be harvested by spam robots or not? (I'm clueless here).

Thanks,
Leo

You could still "scramble" the addresses if you enter them in the text field and submit immediately, and rescramble them everytime the post is edited. However, when someone quotes the text you will have the same problem.

I'm also not really sure if it does help against spam bots, which are getting increasingly more sophisticated and might already translate entities or interpret JavaScript. I think the best would still be making a graphic file yourself with the email address in and posting this inside the text.

Thanks!

Just to make sure - I guess you mean to post just the image of the email address without the actual mailto: link.

Yes indeed.

Dietrich wrote

I'm also not really sure if it does help against spam bots, which are getting increasingly more sophisticated and might already translate entities or interpret JavaScript.

"Scrambling" text into entities does indeed not help against email address harvesting bots, they read the entities just as easily as the plain characters.

so - i know it's beyond the scope of this discussion - but what does helps again the harvesting bots? could you point me to any sources?

(well i'll search for the info too)

Thanks,
Leo

Simple: Don't use email addresses, in readable text or in mailto links, on freely accessible web pages or in forum postings that can be read by anyone.

A common approach is to use a contact form instead, and secure the form with means that are effective today. CAPTCHA is used a lot, but it depends on how good (and often how unknown) the code image generating is. It's a continuous struggle and changes every once in a while. And when you notice email address harvesting bots have broken through it's ofcourse already too late.

Actually, I found an interesting solution here:

http://www.maxi-pedia.com/prevent+email+address+harvesting

Break down e-mail address into parts and use JavaScript to combine it.

As long as a bot doesn't have an interpreter for JavaScript. Even a simple one just for parsing these write() calls.

damn!

Thanks for the detailed explanations, Dietrich. (And for the great software, btw. I probably checked some 20 other PHP forums, yours was the last one and the only one I really liked).