hiding email addresses from spammers

[daliren]

I maintain an online directory of psychotherapists that provides contact information to users and am trying to figure out a way to disguise members' email addresses in the html. I have already built an interface for my contact at the site to enter member information. Currently, they simply enter the email address into the corresponding text-box and the address is stored in MySQL verbatim. I would like to make it so that if, say "[e-mail]" is entered, "&109;&101;etc... is what actually gets stored in the database, which of course will display as the former in browsers, but as the latter to spiders and bots, hence reducing spam. Has anyone done something similar to this?

• I changed "#" to "*" so you could see what I am trying to do.

[Zack]

you could try MD5 encrypting, but you wont be able to read the text address ever again... what you could also try (I never have) is having two fields in the table, so that the first part of the email address is in one field and the the second part in another..

for example, it would be like:

print "$email_part_1 . @ . $email_part_2";

then the spammer wont be able to read it out the the db...

just a thought, dont know if its what youre looking for...

[Apfelsafft]

Hi,

a very simple way could be to use the str_rot13() function in php.
It rotates the string by 13 chars so it can be encoded and decoded by the same function.
I don't know if spiders are that smart or not, but try it. There are several ways to encode and decode strings.
If you write your own en/decode functions you can specify the number of shifts by yourself, which makes it much harder to read by bots.
Anotherway to display a email adress could be, to convert it to an image before you send it to the browser. See the image functions of php.

maybe it helps...

[matt_4013]

G'day!

Did you want to encode the whole address, or just the special characters that the bots pick up? The latter would be better, just to keep browser processing down, you know? Anyway, if this is the case what you'll want to do is a simple str_replace. the str_replace function accepts arrays as parameters, so, all you need is an array with your search values, and a corresponding array with your replace values (this can be multidimensional for ease of use), and use them as parameters, like so:

$aStrRep['search'] = array("&", "@", ".");
$aStrRep['replace'] = array("&", "@", ".");

$email = str_replace($aStrRep['search'], $aStrRep['replace'], $email);