The ReCaptcha MailHide API
I liked Michael Fienen’s post at doteduguru.com yesterday about obfuscating email addresses - lots of good methods to try to hide email addresses from spam robots, even though sometimes we’ve already lost the war on spam and robots scraping out sites. Would the fight be better fought on the spam filter and blocking end? Hard to say.
I tweeted Fienen yesterday that ReCaptcha also has a mail hiding API that makes the user solve a CAPTCHA before getting access to your email address. Here’s an example: i…@highedwebtech.com (hint, click on the … bit before the @).
I like this system because the validation of the captcha is handled by ReCaptcha. You could easily roll this out using their API to many of your pages easily. This method also addresses accessibity as you can get an audio captcha as well.
However, the downside is that a user would need to complete one of these each time they want an e-mail address. I get notes from faculty members often that tell me they want to get email addresses for a bunch of students quickly sometimes and captcha’s and the like slow them down.
Back in June, I blogged about using ReCaptcha on the majority of the forms at my school. We’ve got a centralized system that allows users to build web forms and they were getting hammered. Adding in the ReCaptcha has pretty much stopped that spam, which is nice.
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