scramble all email addresses in pages served by LJ

[notestaff]

Title
scramble all email addresses in pages served by LJ

Short, concise description of the idea
whenever a page is served by LJ (e.g. when an entry or a comment is displayed), find all email addresses in it and scramble them so spam bots can't read them.

Full description of the ideaRight now nothing protects email addresses mentioned in LJ blogs from

Comments

[mooism]

If I post an e-mail address to my LJ, I do not want it mangled in such a way that javascript is required to view it.

Apart from that caveat, I agree with this suggestion.

[notestaff]

http://www.robelle.com/tips/email-cloak.html describes one javascript-free approach.

[mooism]

Yes, and it also describes a javascript-dependent approach, hence my caveat.

[anotherdream]

Not all people will want addresses scrambled - they'll want them easily available, clickable, and so forth. Forcing this on them would be rude to say the least.

(I'm not taking sides. But don't assume everyone wants LJ to do this for them. And a definite no to a JS-only approach.)

[to_the_editor]

could this be a per-journal option, where the default is to obscure but you can turn it off?

[fyre]

OMGWTFBBG! Tihs bettah b off to start. I wantz da optin.

(heh, kidding)

[ladysorka]

...but email address scrambling only protects people from spammers, it still leaves the address easily clickable.

In fact, scrambling would make them more so, as you'd have fewer people giving others their emails like "name at service".

[to_the_editor]

actually "obscured" means it's obscured from spambots but humans still see it normally. the HTML is rewritten but the rendering is still the same.

[pauamma]

Does it work in all browsers, including text-only browsers such as lynx? How does it work with audio browsers or speech synthesis?

[notestaff]

it should -- this is standard html that specifies a sequence of characters. it just specifies some characters as normal ASCII letters and other characters as HTML numeric codes. but i can imagine some audio browsers being thrown off by this.

Put me down as a no, please

[pauamma]

I don't see the point:

- If you don't want an entry to be visible to harvesting bots, don't make it public.

- There are other ways to obscure email addresses that don't rely on LiveJournal mechanisms, but only on agreement between sender and intended recipients, and thus are easier to change when they stop working.

- There are ways to send email to LiveJournal users without knowing their email addresses.

Re: Put me down as a no, please

[notestaff]

the main scenario is when someone quotes my email (or someone's email containing my email address) in their journal, and my email address escapes to the spammers. e.g. yahoo scrambles all addresses that appear in the body of messages on their message groups, and they often end up auto-protecting email addresses that would otherwise be unintentionally exposed.

Re: Put me down as a no, please

[neitherday]

People can quote your emails in a wide variety of places, including USENET (a.k.a. Spambot Heaven). Even if this suggestion were implemented, it would be a very long way from solving your problem.

Re: Put me down as a no, please

[bride]

Agreed. I don't see how any kind of "obscuring" will do a damned thing either. As long as a human can figure it out, it really doesn't take much to automate the task.

[cos]

any method of scrambling that does not remove some functionality, can be read by a spam harvesting bot. They're just software, like your browser. To make it impossible for a piece of software to harvest the email address, you... make it impossible for a piece of software to read the address. There are different levels of obscurity that result in different levels of removed functionality, all the way down to making it an image file - so humans can see it and copy it by hand.

Let people make their own tradeoffs, and decide what level of scrambling they want. Don't force it on them, or cause it to happen automatically in a way that people posting the addresses don't know is going to happen.