Obfuscation Plugin
Obfuscate emails and phone numbers for spammers, but not for your human visitors.
How to Use it
Simply add the respective component onto your page and in specify the email address or phone number in the component's settings. The plugin will then automatically present bots with obfuscated data, but humans receive a nicely formatted link.
Why Should I Bother
Spammers try to crawl to internet for email addresses to send spam to. This is why you sometimes see emails written like 'mail(at)example.com'. This improves your resilience against spammers, but it is also annoying for regular, human users. This plugin solves this problem, by transforming to human readable and even linked formats as soon as we are reasonably sure that a visitor is human.
Credit
This plugin was partly inspired by SpamSpan.
License
All parts of this software are licensed under LGPL 3.0 or any later version (SPDX license indicator: LGPL-3.0-or-later). See the license files in the source code for details.
Copyright 2022 Michael Heider
Documentation
General
The plugin features two components, one for email addresses and one for phone numbers.
Components
Configuration:
- Display Text: If given, display this text instead of the unobfuscated email / phone. Make sure this does not contain your email/phone, as it is not obfuscated!
- E-Mail address / Phone number: Your email / phone in usual format (no obfuscation).
Mail Component
Additional configuration:
- Subject: Default subject when the link is opened in an email program.
- Body: Default body when the link is opened in an email program.
Phone Component
The displayed phone number (assuming no display text is provided) is equal to what was entered in the component's config. This means you can use your own phone number format. The phone number in the href has all non numeric characters removed, except a leading '+' if present.
How it Works
The obfuscation is JavaScript based. This means that the HTML code contains only an obfuscated version of the data, but as soon as the document and the script are loaded it is immediately changed into a perfectly normal, human readable format.
What about Users with JavaScript disabled
The obfuscation is designed so that even without the transformation, the data is still human readable, although slightly obfuscated. Also, it does not feature a link. If you want to see exactly what it looks like you can either temporarily disable injecting of the obfuscation script in the plugin's settings or disable JavaScript in your browser.
How Good is the Obfuscation
No obfuscation is perfect. Given a good enough bot or one that is tailored to exactly this format, you can still scrape the email addresses or phone numbers. However, it already requires more effort. Furthermore, spammers could also execute the JavaScript before searching email addresses, but this incurs a higher load on the spammers' systems.
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This plugin has not been reviewed yet.
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| 2.1.2 |
Minor improvements. Jun 19, 2022 |
|---|---|
| 2.1.1 |
Public release. Internal changes. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 2.1.0 |
Update phone regex to support more international formats. Slightly change obfuscated layouts. Bug fixes in human readable phone number cleaning. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 2.0.0 |
Change license. Replace modified SpamSpan with completely custom implementation. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 1.1.1 |
Fix wrong license included. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 1.1.0 |
Add composer.json for compatibility with OctoberCMS 2. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 1.0.0 |
Release. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 0.4.0 |
Phone component. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 0.3.0 |
Renamed mail component to email. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 0.2.0 |
E-Mail component working, updated SpamSpan. Jun 16, 2022 |
| 0.1.0 |
Initialize plugin. Jun 16, 2022 |