Spam Proofing Your Websites
By
William
Bontrager
Visitor feedback forms have
been around ever since browsers have supported CGI.
They're on most professional sites. Certainly they are on those sites which
best project friendly customer service.
Today, we'll use the feedback form to help spam proof your sites.
Spammer's email harvesting robots scan your site for email addresses. Then
the addresses become part of spammers' mailing lists.
Here is a practical way to remove all email addresses from your site. And
whether or not your sites have access to their own CGI.
(Spammers collect email addresses from other sources, too. Spam proofing
sites removes only one source.)
I'm on a mission.
I don't like spammers harvesting email addresses from our sites. Uninvited,
demanding our time and stealing our resources to sate their greed by pushing
their impatience-soaked ideas into our faces. And I don't like them doing
it to our friends.
So, I decided to do something about it.
The result is MasterFeedback, a visitor feedback form and Perl CGI script.
The form contains no email addresses in the HTML code or on the page, not
even in a hidden form field.
The script is freely available for download, along with a generic HTML form
you can modify. This free version is for Unix servers. (Find download URL
further below.)
There is also a version for:
-
folks who don't have CGI for their
sites.
-
web sites on NT or other non-Unix
operating systems.
-
folks who don't want to mess with
scripts but still want the benefits.
This second version requires sign-up
and a monthly fee.
While I was making MasterFeedback, Mari Bontrager made graphical buttons
with our email addresses as images. These will be our links to the feedback
forms.
Spam proofing your sites is a simple two-step process:
(1) Obtain a feedback form.
(2) Eliminate all email addresses and replace them with links to your feedback
forms.
That's it!
STEP: (1) Obtain a feedback form.
This means you either acquire and install a script for that purpose, or you
use a script hosted on someone else's server.
MasterFeedback is robust and does the job quite well. But it's not the only
tool around.
If you have CGI:
MasterFeedback (free) (Unix) is available for download at:
http://willmaster.com/master/feedback/
There are dozens of free and shareware feedback scripts. They're available
for all popular operating systems -- Unix, NT, Linux. Some CGI download sites
are listed in the
"Links
and Resources" section.
Whichever script you decide to use, please make sure it does not require
your email address anywhere within your web page, not even in hidden form
fields.
If you do not have CGI (or just don't want to be bothered with
it):
Remote hosted CGI is your solution. This means the forms are on your server
(on your web site), but the script is on someone else's server.
Remote hosted MasterFeedback is designed so your visitors never need to leave
your site. They stay with you, even when they click the submit button. The
service is only $2 per month. Sign up for your 14-day
free trial.
STEP: (2) Eliminate all email addresses and replace them with links to your
feedback forms.
(For illustration purposes, let's suppose your feedback form is at
"http://www.domain.com/feedback.html" and that your email address is
"name@domain.com".)
Replace all occurrences of:
<a href="mailto:name@domain.com">Write Me!</a>
with:
<a href="http://www.domain.com/feedback.html">Write Me!</a>
If you want a graphic link, just replace "Write Me!" (or other link text)
with your graphic's "<IMG ..." tag.
A simple graphic with your email address as the image can present your address
visually and yet not have the text anywhere in your source code. Spammers
are not yet sophisticated enough to make graphic image reading robots.
One more note: To spam proof your sites, no text with an email address can
be in your page source code, anywhere. Not in image "alt" tags, not in META
tags, not in html comment areas, nowhere. You may wish to use your word processor
or page editor's search function to ensure no stray "@" characters with email
addresses remain on your pages.
That's all there is to it.
Happy spammer swatting!
About the Author:
William
Bontrager Programmer/Publisher, "WillMaster Possibilities"
ezine
mailto:possibilities@willmaster.com
Are you looking for top quality scripts? Visit
Willmaster
and check out his highly acclaimed Master Series scripts. Some free, some
for a fee.
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