Posts Tagged ‘CAPTCHA’
Avoid Spam – Mask your Email Address
If you have ever put your email address on your website you will know how quickly spambots get your email address and email huge numbers of messages to your address. There are various scripts (mostly javascript) available which attempt to fool spambots (i.e. hide your email address from spammers) however these scripts are largely ineffective. Spamming is very big business for those involved therefore employing a team of developers to counter masking scripts makes a lot of sense and this is exactly why email masking scripts generally don’t work.
Luckily there is a very good and effective solution. reCAPTCHA Mailhide is provided free of charge by the same team who provide the hundreds of millions of reCAPTCHAs served each day. Most of us have seen and used reCAPTCHA when filling in online forms or subscribing to content. reCAPTCHA helps to distinguish between humans and robots as the text provided in the CAPTCHA is unreadable by robots (actually Optical Character Recognition / OCR software).
reCAPTCHA Mailhide is effective in that your email address is masked (hidden) and only shown when the CAPTCHA is entered correctly i.e. robots are unlikely to be able to read the two words provided in the CAPTCHA. All you need to do is go to the reCAPTCHA Mailhide website and enter your email address. You’ll then be given some HTML to place on your website which will mask your email address until the CAPTCHA is correctly entered.
Below is my email address as displayed using the code provided by reCAPTCHA. Click on the address to reveal the CAPTCHA which must be correctly entered before my email address is shown:
g…@eckstein.id.au
P.S. As you may have noticed I disclose my email address in the footer of this Site without masking it. I am a firm believer in microformats and my email address is part of an hcard. I use two spam filters to weed out junk mail however still manage to get a number of lottery scams and other unsolicited email.
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A new Telstra Blog has gone live over the past few days. The new Blog called ‘Telstra Exchange’ is a replacement for ‘Now We are Talking’. From a technological perspective it’s great that Telstra is again using WordPress as the Content Management System (CMS).
Some of the WordPress Plugins being used are;
- Extended Profile: From WordPress.org: This plugin extends the standard WordPress profile to include additional attributes such as photo, organization, address, phone number, and others. A user’s entire profile can then be output as an hCard on any page using the profile shortcode, or with the provided widget.
- Contact Form 7: From the developer: ‘If you value simplicity and flexibility, Contact Form 7 is a great choice. It allows you to flexibly design the form and mail. You can manage multiple contact forms as well. n addition, it supports many features including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading, etc.’. P.S. I use Contact Form 7 on numerous Blogs and love it!
- WP Text Sizer: From the developer: Provide visitors to your site the the option of increasing or decreasing the size of text onclick of image or text links using JavaScript. This code provides that option yet allows you, the page designer, to control which portions of your layout can have text size adjusted and how much.
- WP-reCAPTCHA: From the developer: reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. Instead of randomly generating useless characters which users grow tired of continuously typing in, risking the possibility that spammers will eventually write sophisticated spam bots which use OCR libraries to read the characters, reCAPTCHA uses a different approach. They effectively kill two birds with one stone.
Great move by Telstra in using WordPress!
Disclaimer: Please note that at publication date of this post I am providing ITIL Process Mapping services for Telstra. I do not represent Telstra in any information on this website. The views expressed in this post are mine only and do not necessarily reflect the views of Telstra
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