Anti-Spam

Spam sucks. Unfortunately, when you post your email address on a web page, rotten little spam-bots crawl across your page looking for <a href="mailto:... tags to add to their evil, evil spammable address databases. One method around this is to hide your email hyperlink inside JavaScript. Unfortunately, spam-bots are wising up to this trick (since JavaScripts are text, they can be read by bots), and in any case, visitors with JavaScript disabled won't be able to see your link. Another method is to cheat by writing out your email address: joe_soap at domain dot com. This frustrates the bots, but it will also frustrate many of your visitors, who will no longer have a clickable link to your email address.

A third method is to hide your email address from bots by using numerical character entity codes in place of the characters they represent. For example, the entity code &#87; equals a and &#49; equals 1. By writing your email address using codes instead of characters, bots will not recognize the mailto: or @ and will pass over your email link in silence.

The table of numerical HTML codes below and the characters they represent. Remember are the numeric character entity codes which must start with an ampersand (&), followed by a pound sign (#), followed by the number, followed by a semicolon.

It may be only a matter of time until the bots catch onto this, but for now it seems to work.