can crawlers/spiders/etc. access PHP scripts?

[dugawug]

hello,
an NPO i am affiliated with has a website and we currently have email addresses with mailto: links stated explicity all over the site. one guy in the organization has said we need to remove all explicit displays of our email addresses or spiders/crawlers/etc. will get them and start spamming us, etc.

we have already got one person who was sent a virus to his email under our domain name.

so it seems you obviously have to make sure that any email like "[e-mail]" has to be completely taken out from the HTML source code, right?

our idea was to set up a PHP form to use for emailing. someone wants to email "Webmaster", so they click a link. The link pops up the email form window and emailing is done right here.

But can these crawlers/spiders and such scan through PHP code? I was hoping to have a big PHP variable list of the email addresses and call them with the URL link, kinda like this:

<a href="emailform.php?name=billybob">Click to email billybob</a>

<?php

$billybob = '[e-mail]';
?>

but stating emails explicitly even in PHP code, is this even safe?
anyone??
thanks in advance

😉

[Shrike]

Web crawlers act just like regular users, they don't do anything special, just request pages. So no, they can't see PHP source code, only the generated output. Having said that, putting your sensitive data somewhere out of the way is a good security measure none the less 🙂

[dugawug]

ok, so i can put all the email addresses in a PHP script and this data won't be accessible to crawlers/spiders...ggod!

Originally posted by Shrike
Having said that, putting your sensitive data somewhere out of the way is a good security measure none the less 🙂

meaning what then? it's safe to do like i mentioned or i should employ more security measures? not sure what you mean here...

[devinemke]

clients (be they spiders/crawlers or anyone else) can only "see" what the server spits back at them. the server is not sending any PHP to the client. PHP is a server-side intermediary step between the HTTP request and the HTTP response. if you don't want to reveal certain info (email addresses, etc.) then do not include them in the output sent to the client.

[dugawug]

cool, i figured that PHP scripts would be safe holding this type of data against spiders and such, but in these days, you never know how far the hackers and such are going!