"Finally, if you're a Webmaster or site owner, HostedScripts has a page
that's absolutely wonderful.
members.hostedscripts.com
The free dynamically generated page is
designed to trap the spiders and robots that spammers use to harvest
E-mail addresses from the Web. These robots usually look for a "mailto:"
HTML tag, or an alphanumeric string with an @ in it somewhere. When they
find something that looks like an E-mail address, they send it back to the
spammer's central database.
The idea behind the 'bot trapper is to place a link to
members.hostedscripts.com on your site, so any
address-harvesting robots traversing your pages will detour off to that page.
Each time it's visited, the HostedScripts page generates 100 totally bogus,
totally random fake E-mail addresses, complete with "mailto:" tags. The
bottom of the page features a recursive link back to the same page. So an
E-mail-harvesting robot will enter the page, find 100 fake E-mail addresses,
then follow the link on the bottom of the page back to the same page, where
it discovers 100 new (fake) addresses, etc. It's an endless loop that can
stuff a spammer's databases full of useless fake addresses.
Of course, a clever spammer can build a robot to skip the "hostedscripts"
domain or any recursive pages. But the scripting trick can easily be locally
duplicated on any site. If most sites offered up at least one page of
legitimate-looking but totally fake addresses that a spammer would have to
identify and weed out of their databases, Web-based address-harvesting
would become far less attractive and economical for spammers. I love this
idea!"
informationweek.com |
