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Posted by Nikita the Spider on 10/13/06 14:22
In article <452f3d17$0$53312$dbd4f001@news.euronet.nl>,
"Nico Schuyt" <nschuyt@hotmail.com> wrote:
> dorayme wrote:
> > "Nico Schuyt" <nschuyt@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Nikita the Spider wrote:
> >>> I've set up several spamtrap addresses to study this. Eventually
> >>> I'll write a short article about my findings, but in the meantime
> >>> I'll summarize here. I have three email addresses all on the same
> >>> page. One is naked (i.e. just foo@example.com), one is entity
> >>> encoded (i.e. foo etc.) and one is added to the
> >>> page by Javascript. The number of spams each has gotten to date is
> >>> as follows: naked - 715
> >>> entities - 2
> >>> javascript - 1
> >>> In short, the entities look pretty effective to me. They're nice
> >>> because they don't disturb one's visitors at all and you don't have
> >>> to mess around with any Javascript.
> >>> But another way of looking at it is to say that Javascript
> >>> protection is twice as effective as entity protection. =) (Thanks
> >>> to Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics")
>
> >> Both are unreliable. Even *I* can make script that extracts email
> >> addresses from JS or entity coded text :-)
> >> Use a mail form.
A mail form != an email address hyperlink. The former is less convenient
for the user. Yes, email forms limit spam but so does putting one's
email address in an image instead of text, or writing "foo (at) example
dot com". As John Dunlop rightly said, that's "passing the buck" -- you
inconvenience the user. I want to avoid that if possible.
> > Would you, Mr Korpela and Jock - you see, Nico what good company
> > you are in... :) - please not ignore the fact that it works to
> > actually stop spam.
>
> Working *now* is no guarantee what so ever for being effective in the near
> future.
The same could be said for all spam blocking methods (my Bayesian
filters used to work a lot better, for example). So should we should
abandon all attempts to block spam because none of them are guaranteed?
Hmmmm, OK. But you go first. ;)
--
Philip
http://NikitaTheSpider.com/
Whole-site HTML validation, link checking and more
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