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On my website I show to the user:"name, tel, email, contact address". It is not plain text, it is a picure, which contains all the above mentioned data.

I don't want any robot to collect these data, so I thought I should draw some dots and line, rearrange letters, something like recaptcha.

This is for robots(may be they use OCR software ?!), who search for email addresses and telephone numbers.

But does it make sense, what I want to do or is this not a real threat ?

Something like this:

http://lab.vente-privee.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Captcha1.gif

Kris Vandermotten
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BlaBlub
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  • I wonder why you'd want to whole world to know that information. Why not have a contact form on your site? – MvdD Sep 16 '15 at 15:55
  • Yes, I do have a contact form, but the adress is also there. Ithought of web crawler how search for email addresses and add my email to there spam list or any automatic programs how collect my addresses to theire services, which I dont want to linked to. – BlaBlub Sep 16 '15 at 17:41

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You might overestimate the importance of your email address to spammers.

I'm highly in doubt that they make the effort to implement OCR functionality to their bots. They would have to download and analyze every image they come across, which would be a huge waste of resources.

There are better ways of hiding email addresses from crawlers, e.g. obfuscate it with JavaScript. You can find an example at Effective method to hide email from spam bots.

Yes, analyzing JS is possible (e.g. Google does it), but not an easy task and - again - I don't think that spammers do this. It takes effort and it slows down the throughput - just to give you maybe 0.1% more output.

CarHa
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