A Question

[batskeets]

Here's one for the masses... my boss keeps asking me if there's a way for us to prevent spam bots and shit from harvesting e-mail addresses off the School of Journalism web site. I don't really know the answer to that. Does anybody have suggestions?

Comments

Well..

[ferrell.livejournal.com]

You could always create a spam bot to spam any address that spams you in a futile attempt to crash it. :P

Re: Well..

[skeets.livejournal.com]

Damn straight. That's what them mo'fo's get!

you can try this eh.

[niro.livejournal.com]

You can set up a minefield to keep the spambots from ever getting to the regular pages that might contain email. Check out wpoison it's a good program, and they have a good explanation of what, why, and how it works.

Another technique for the more adventurous is, since spambots usually ignore robot exclusion protocol stuff (robots.txt files) you may be able to set up a page that when accessed bans the host that accessed, at least for a period of time. Then set up invisible links to it, and setup robots.txt to have real robots ignore it.

Nothing can really guarantee that you'll prevent spam bots, but you can make it a lot less friendly for them.