Difference between revisions of "ProtectEmail"

Automatic Protect of Emails

The AboutUs system now recognizes email addresses in text when you click the "save" button on WikiPages and will automatically add the "<email>" tags.

Turning this off if for some reasons you'd prefer that the system not automatically protect email addresses, just click the "Don't automatically protect email addresses" option box (above the "Save page" button)

Protect an email from spammer "scraping" by turning it into a graphic.

This wiki has a feature which allows one to "protect" an e-mail address from spammers who "scrape" websites for e-mail addresses, and yet still allow humans to see it. Here's how it works.

Enter an e-mail address as follows:

you @ email.com

This address will now show on screen correctly, but as a graphic image instead of text:

If you want to edit the address, it will look like this:

<email>2c4a38d18b051c842e646536fab6a9ee</email>

If you want to change it, just replace the "gobbledygook" in the middle with the new e-mail address and the graphic version will be updated. Please note, the graphical representation of your updated text will not be rendered in a preview of the page but only when the page is saved and viewed.

If you put [[ProtectEmail]] in the edit summary, others can learn how you did it!

Note: When you use "show preview" the protected email address will not be displayed. When you save the changes, the image will be readable.

Discussion

Merge in with ProtectEmail

I do not know why there should be two pages on the same topic. Why not merge How can I protect an e-mail address? with ProtectEmail?

Good point! RayKing

e-mail image not displayed in preview

Maybe its a bug but it should at least be mentioned that the image does not show up in the preview but does when saving the article. --GrandiJoos 11:53, 22 October 2006 (PDT)

I think this is pretty useless since there are programs out there that can read information from images. like all the bots which read captchas to register to forums and blogs do. http://images.google.com/images?q=site:www.aboutus.org&nojs=1&safe=off&imgsz=icon - see how easy it is for a spammer to collect valid emails here?

Thanks for the good point. We'll see what we can do about this. It's very high in the queue!!! Brandon CS Sanders 16:30, 22 November 2006 (PST)

I can not see the problem!? A link to the page would be okay; but the email address seems still protected. User:Sendermann-gmbh 31.03.2007

Solution to image-scraping?

reCAPTCHA has this great mailhide feature and they have a php library available. The user can't see the email address until he/she clicks on a link. A new window opens asking the user to answer a captcha. If the captcha is answered correctly, the email is shown. I was wondering if this could be used on AboutUs, even though it's a wiki.

More information

Vartan | talk 19:46, 5 October 2007 (PDT)