A while ago, me and Gary collaborated on a method to stop nasty types from getting emails off of the dramsoc website. It’s a low hanging fruit solution – using javascript to write out encoded characters, cunningly done so that nobody even notices what’s going on. The point of it is that it raises the bar to harvesting the addresses, and most importantly, since it’s just some little thing that me and Gary cooked up, it’s unlikely that someone will reverse engineer it to get at the email addresses. If our little method (it’s Gary’s really, but I don’t mind stealing credit) became widely used, it would be somewhat juicier fruit, and someone would attack it. (That’s a hint by the way – don’t anyone start using it to list millions of addys. OK?)
However, the dramsoc email address (the one at the top of the DramSoc website gets lots of spam apparently (although I’m not sure if this relates to the @ic address instead), and here’s the problem – our method doesn’t help when you write out the email address on the page. Try entering in “www.dramsoc.org” into this page (explanations). Notice that the email link to elpresidente doesn’t get found, since that just has “Martin” instead of the email address. If you’re techy minded, have a look at the source to see what’s happening.
Oh well. Next time he’s bored, maybe Gary will write another little javascript thingy.
. More importantly, I might then be tempted to play the lottery…
