aligning text gifs

[Roedy Green]

I wrote a little java program to stomp out png image files the text of
people's email addresses. The idea is spam harvesters will have a
harder time harvesting them automatically off websites.

The catch is they don't line up with the rest of the text.

Is there a way to fix that other than by putting everything in table
cells?

 

[Steve Pugh]

I wrote a little java program to stomp out png image files the text of
people's email addresses. The idea is spam harvesters will have a
harder time harvesting them automatically off websites.

PNG or GIF? Your subject line says one thing your message says
another.

Anyway, have you thought about users who have image loading turned
off? Blind users? Users who need very large font sizes? None of them
can read your image, so you need to provide the e-mail address in the
alt attribute. But the spam harvesters can read the alt attribute.

And presumably the images aren't links (as spam harvesters can read
the e-mail address out of the mailto: link)? So the user has to type
out the e-mail address in their e-mail application (which they first
have to open beacuse there's no mailto: link to click on to open it
automatically).

So for some users the e-mail address is totally hidden and for others
its extra work to use.

Doesn't a form sound like a better approach?

The catch is they don't line up with the rest of the text.
URL?

Is there a way to fix that other than by putting everything in table
cells?

The align attribute or the CSS vertical-align property. Of course as
the text is of variable size by its very nature and as bitmap images
linke PNG or GIF are of fixed size the text and images will only ever
align under a minority of circumstances.

Steve

 

[jake]

PNG or GIF? Your subject line says one thing your message says
another.

Anyway, have you thought about users who have image loading turned
off? Blind users? Users who need very large font sizes? None of them
can read your image, so you need to provide the e-mail address in the
alt attribute. But the spam harvesters can read the alt attribute.

Except that you can 'spell out' the content of the email address in the
alternative text; the sight impaired will hear it, but I doubt that the
email address harvesters can figure it our

e.g.

alt="civic offices at A O L dot com"

Not ideal, but probably works OK if there's just the odd address on the
page/site. It depends on how desperate you are to reduce the amount of
spamming to a given address.

A form's better, but not always a possibility.

 

[Steve Pugh]

Except that you can 'spell out' the content of the email address in the
alternative text; the sight impaired will hear it, but I doubt that the
email address harvesters can figure it our

alt="civic offices at A O L dot com"

If someone is going to do that then why don't they just spell it out
in text and skip the image?

Steve

 

[Spartanicus]

If someone is going to do that then why don't they just spell it out
in text and skip the image?

Because (e-mail address removed) looks like an email address and "me at privacy
dot net" does not.

(e-mail address removed) and "me at privacy dot net" read out by a speaking
browser sound identical.

 

[Mitja]

I wrote a little java program to stomp out png image files the text of
people's email addresses. The idea is spam harvesters will have a
harder time harvesting them automatically off websites.

The catch is they don't line up with the rest of the text.

Is there a way to fix that other than by putting everything in table
cells?

Sure, CSS. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visudet.html#propdef-vertical-align

 

[Roedy Green]

A form's better, but not always a possibility.

This requires a Servlet and custom code on the server. Most people
don't have access to that.

Forms have the disadvantage of not letting you compose with your
normal email software and keep a copy there.


If they are too nosy, then people will avoid them.

 

[Roedy Green]

Because (e-mail address removed) looks like an email address and "me at privacy
dot net" does not.

It would not be hard for a spam harvester to reconstruct the address
by changing all instances of " at " to @ and " dot " to "." etc.

He does not have to hit 100% accuracy. If he hits even 10% he is
still ahead.

 

[Spartanicus]

It would not be hard for a spam harvester to reconstruct the address
by changing all instances of " at " to @ and " dot " to "." etc.

Nor would it be hard to decode character references, or read javascript
document.write's, reading an email address from an image is also quite
doable

The point is that I've seen no evidence that spam harvesters do any of
these things.

 

[Roedy Green]

PNG or GIF? Your subject line says one thing your message says
another.

It started out as gif, then I discovered Sun Java does actually
support generating gifs, just pngs and jpgs.

 

[Mitja]

Spartanicus <[email protected]>
(wrote:

Nor would it be hard to decode character references, or read
javascript document.write's, reading an email address from an image
is also quite doable

The point is that I've seen no evidence that spam harvesters do any of
these things.

From what I know, they don't do it. From their point of view - why use
processpr power for such stuff? It's more effective to hit another coupla
sites and get a bunch of plain-text addresses.

The way people are (becoming) aware of the situation, though, things may
change in the future, if the haven't yet.

 

[Roedy Green]

I wrote a little java program to stomp out png image files the text of
people's email addresses. The idea is spam harvesters will have a
harder time harvesting them automatically off websites.

You can generate such png files at http://mindprod.com/masker.html