Spammers

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ed O'Brien
  • Start date Start date
E

Ed O'Brien

Can anyone tell me before I spend loads of money on extensions.... does
using form fields in a "Contact us" page fool the spammers?

TIA

Ed
 
Extensions are usually provided free by good web hosts - and some good
hosts are very low cost.
The FrontPage forms include the email address in the HTML, so will not fool
any spammers.
To fool the spammers, you need custom written server side form handlers,
using PHP, ASP, ASP.net or Perl/CGI etc. Check which of these your host
will support.
 
The form handler in Frontpage won't fool anyone, since the email address is
still visible in the code (in the 'webbot' code).

eg:

<form method="POST" action="--WEBBOT-SELF--">
<!--webbot bot="SaveResults" S-Format="TEXT/CSV" S-Label-Fields="TRUE"
B-Reverse-Chronology="FALSE" S-Email-Format="TEXT/PRE"
[email protected] B-Email-Label-Fields="TRUE"
S-Builtin-Fields -->
<p><input type="text" name="T1" size="20"><input type="submit"
value="Submit" name="B1"><input type="reset" value="Reset" name="B2"></p>
</form>

See - the email address is in plain view and spam-bots can still harvest
this.

The issue you would be asking about is to place the "To" email in the script
that sends the email, rather than in the form, but you can't do this with
the default frontpage form handler; you need a third-party script suitable
for your server (unix/linux/windows), and depends on what your host supports
(they may even offer such a script as part of your hosting service)
 
Yes, I realize the e-mail is within the code but it is not isolated, i.e,
there are no spaces between the e-mail address and adjacent code. I thought
this might fool trawlers.

Ed
 
The email address is isolated enough for the extensions to find it -
spambots know all the tricks and will find it very quickly. Since FP forms
are very popular, there are spambots that look for FrontPage forms ...
 
Thanks for that...

I guess I'll have to talk to my ISP and follow your advice.

Regards,

Ed
 
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