Feature request per my clients: mailto encryption?

[albo]

As we know, spam-bots crawl websites, looking for patterns such as something@something.something as potential targets for spam. One of my clients has a plethora of email addresses on their website (project leaders, and the like). They would prefer not to become immediate spam targets.

One way this may be avoided is to provide rather simple encryption of the targets of <a href="mailto:" values in flat website files. This could be handled by the website author (me) manually, simply, highlighting the mailto target, and clicking a tool on a toolbar. It surely would be a handy feature!

If and until such a feature is added to WebBuilder, of course, I can do this on my own, with other free utilities...it's just a bit more time-consuming to cut-and-paste.

[syrupcore]

you could do this with a little bit of javascript. write you email addresses with some sort of key like address____website.com then use javascript to find "____" and replace it with @ once the page is loaded.

you can also use js to do a blank replace. something like this:

Code: Select all

html:
<p>if you have any questions, <span id="mailjoe"></span>.</p>

<p>mary's email address is: <span id="mailmary"></span></p>


javascript:
var emailjoe=('joe' + 'client@' + 'mysite.org');
var emailmary=('mary' + 'client@' + 'mysite.org');
document.getElementById('mailjoe').innerHTML = ('<a href="mailto:' + emailjoe + '">' + 'Contact Joe' + '</a>');
document.getElementById('mailmary').innerHTML = ('<a href="mailto:' + emailmary+ '">' + emailmary + '</a>');

I didn't actually test that but it should work. the idea is that when a bot scrapes the page, they'll just get empty <span>s. when the page is loaded, the empty spans are replaced with the email address and link text. Actually, I think you could also simplify this by using javascript to replace the mailto: attribute. I don't have the steam to rewrite it though!

good luck,
will

[Karlis]

Currently I think this is out of the scope of WeBuilder. Because encrypting mailto is actually programming task which is done differently by each of us.