On Tue, February 27, 2007 10:22 pm, John Taylor-Johnston wrote: > I need an anti-spam-spider measure for my site. Too many addresses are > getting raked. In once instance, I created a flash page: > http://erasethis.glquebec.org/English/contact.htm > But I just don't have the time to create a flash image for every > single > instance, most of which come from dynamically printed PHP pages from a > MySQL database. > > Could I dynamically create a flash image, input the email and tell the > flash image to mailto:the@xxxxxxxxxxx? > > Do anyone have a solution? Does one already exist? http://php.net/ming would let you do exactly that, assuming the Actionscript to send the email will work. > My idea was to create a PHP script and output to a png. But I see many > problems, including: > > 1) How do I avoid echoing the email address in the <a href=""> tag? > 2) How would I write a png that would be long and high enough? > 3) How would the same script display the png? You could "obfuscate" the address with html encoding, such as: @ -> @ in the HTML @ -> %40 in the URL I believe the scrapers/spammers are still not bothering to defeat this trivial exercise because they still get a million hits looking for plain old emails. > In short, I can't see far enough how to do this and avoid > spider-raking > in the HTML or header the content of the image. I would suspect that every email is tied to some database record, like an ID. Provide a FORM which has only the ID in it, and lookup the email, and send the email out yourself from your own server. Yes, you could end up sending a LOT of email. Or not, since you now control the sending with PHP and can refuse to send in whatever scenario you find unacceptable. For example, one of my sites does this but won't send more than 4 emails from any given IP address in one 24-hour period. So a scraper/spammer would need to alter their IP every 4 POST operations, which is really more work than they'll put into it. On a super busy server with millions of users or millions of potential recipients, this would probably be a big deal... On MOST websites, you'll essentially be playing postman for a couple legit emails a day, at most, and not having any problem with scrapers/spammers. -- Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some starving artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
