[TAG] The Spam Reduction Act :)

[Ben Okopnik]

I've built a "zero spambot bait" mechanism for email addresses. It's
already implemented for the authors' emails (you can see the result in
the bios); unless someone sees a problem with the idea, I'm going to
extend it to any addresses exposed in the content as well.

The way it works for authors is that I've made all the email addresses
in the bio "source" files private (i.e., they don't show up anywhere in
the published content.) Next, I set up a little script -
$LG_ROOT/bin/emailpic for those who have updated their SVN repository
lately - that converts that string to a tiny PNG image, ~200 bytes. I
also updated Mike's Cheetah template for bio generation. Last, the only
thing that's contained in the 'email:' field is the name of that file
(if I knew Python, I'd just key it off the file name, but I don't.)

The result is that instead of the entity hash that we've been using to
hide the addresses - a technique whose usefulness decreases as time goes
on - we now have

<strong>E-mail: </strong><img src="../gx/authors/email/okopnik.png"><br>

(Let them 'bot *this*.)

The way I see it working for content is to do the conversion for any
rfc822 string, name the image with a per-article sequential number, and
place the images in the misc/<author> directory, which is where the
images for a given article normally go.

Thoughts, anyone?


* Ben Okopnik * okopnik.freeshell.org * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette *
-*- See the Linux Gazette in its new home: <http://linuxgazette.net> -*-