Hiding data from screen scrapers and bots

[Brian W]

I was hoping someone here would know something about screen scrapers,
spiders, bots. Perhaps it's a stupid question, but here it goes
anyway...

Is there any way to make data harder for a screen scraper, spider or bot to
collect?

I don't mind people going to a page and looking at the data I have on the
page, obviously, or I wouldn't be putting it on a web page in the first
place. I just want to make it as difficult as possible (within reason) for
automated processes from gathering this info for SPAM (email & telephone)

My first instinct is to do something like this:
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>D</td>
<td>a</td>
<td>t</td>
<td>a</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>T</td>
<td>o</td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td>H</td>
<td>i</td>
<td>d</td>
<td>e</td>
</tr>

My other idea was to use the method above, but instead of using the
characters in each cell, I would use the code for each character.

Any ideas?

Thanks
Brian W

BTW, I don't want to use JPGs of GIFs

 

[Tian Min Huang]

Hi Brian,

I think you could also have a random number of rows at the top of the table
with a height of zero. This would make it impossible for some scraper to
know where a specific piece of information is.

Have a nice day.

Regards,

HuangTM
Microsoft Online Partner Support
MCSE/MCSD

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