Inspired by a recent ongoing dialog on the TextMate blog about obfuscating email addresses to prevent spambots from scraping and foiling their masters’ plans to rule the world via junkmail, I wrote a WordPress plugin called Email Entitizer.
What this does is filter all email addresses on your site and converts them into numeric HTML entities. It also wraps them in mailto links as a convenience. In future versions I’ll add a configuration page where this is made optional.
Allan Odgaard of Macromates has casually tested this method of protection with good results, and in the week or two since I wrote the plugin, my spam has not gone up at all. I receive about 2-3 junk emails per day on that address, and have for a good two years now.
So, it seems to be working rather well. If you’d like to make use of this plugin, feel free to download it here:
Simply unzip, upload into your WordPress plugins directory, and activate via the Plugins page of the Admin panel. Or you could try out OneClick for WordPress from Thought Outflux. Pretty damn cool.
Feel free to modify the code. Let me know of any modifications, ask questions, request new features or report bugs via thynctank@thynctank.com.
2 Comments
Brilliant!
Good stuff
Added it to stumble.