Hiding email address

[Gisella]

Hello again,
I had installed a plugin that had worked pretty well in other occasions to reduce spam:

Email Address Encoder

As far as I know it’s supposed to work whenever it finds “mailto:” (like in the link I tried to add in the text block under it). But it doesn’t seem to work in the contacts template – where I’d like to put it.

Any suggestions?
Or maybe do you think that after I could leave it as is, and just let antispam do the job? 🙂

[Bill Robbins]

Very good question. The plugin works great with the content in pages and posts, but not items that are part of the themes themselves.

WordPress does have a function to obscure email addresses — it’s actually the same function the plugin uses.

I just published an update to the theme that makes use of that function. It should appear shortly in the updates section of your dashboard. It should obscure the email address in the contact section from bots.

Let me know if you have any trouble.

Have a great week,
Bill

[Gisella]

Ok, I updated the theme and I can see it did obscure the “mailto:” part exactly in the same way as the plugin did. Great!

Just one more question, though, since I don’t know bots so well: the email is still visible in the source page just as it is on the actual page – because in the contact form I can’t substitute the real mail with something like “write us” “send us a mail”.

Do bots ignore those and only gather “mailto:” ones?

[Bill Robbins]

It’s my understanding that bots most often pull from the mailto spot. Plus it’s a good idea to have a human readable email address in case the user doesn’t have a default email client configured or if they are using a public computer.

Bill

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