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display email in a safe not scrapable way

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Doe anyone know how to display an email address in a way that will not allow it to be automaticallly gathered by crawling scripts. Similar to how facebook do it (almost like showing the email as an image). Or even a different way.

The email and other info will be pulled from a database.

I don't care if the email is displayed without the mailto: and isn't clickable, it just needs to be displayed.

Thanks for any help.
 
I don't know for sure but I reckon if you were using PHP you would be able to use some of the graphic display modules to convert text to an image.

Rgds
 
Thanks for the suggestions systreg. Accel. I've been trying to find something that works giving a graphic display with php... just couldn't think of the right search term - I think systreg hit the nail on the head with 'Obfuscator'

Appreciate the tips guys.
 
The big issue with those javascript options is PDA's, Mobiles and Smart Phones don't like them much, and lots of people don't have javascript enabled on their machines so your cutting them out using a purely javascript option.

Also unless your use a unique custom wrote function spambots detect the code that everyone uses and pieces together emails in the examples that systreg posted, so its not that safe.

I personally use forms but when I need to display an email I use a graphic that used a gradient colour to make it harder for OCR spam bots to read the image, I also pull the emails from a database if there are alot of them or if just a few I use a Select Case / Switch like

switch (strtolower($email_id)) {
case "0":
$email = "[email protected]";
break;

case "1":
$email = "[email protected]";
break;

case "admin":
$email = "[email protected]";
break;

case "info":
$email = "[email protected]";
break;

default:
$email = "[email protected]";
break;
}

I then pass it to a function I bastardised from PHP script to convert email addresses to graphic to generate my graphic, then wrap the graphic in a link to my form.

Then when someone clicks on a link, I forward them to my form with the email pre-selected by the contact.php?id=0/1/admin/info, the form has a captcha code on it too. That way people can either write the email down or use the form provided.

Its trial and error what you do but you need to try each thing and see how it works out for you.

.
 
Thanks skinner, I'm p[lanning on working on this later through the night, I think the tips here will help me a lot. Really appreciate it.
 
I have a small php script that will do this woop woop. You just need GD to be installed on your server (it probably is by default) then call the image like so:

<img src="img.php?text='.$email.'">

Where $email is your text. It caches the genereated images too. Let me know if you want it.

Grant
 
Hi Grant,

I'll pm you my email address - would be great if you could send me this.
I never got round to researching this.

Thanks

Matt
 
Grant won't that script still leave the email visible in the html and the spam bots will still read it ?
 
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