Hi All: I just executed a search on Bots lifting contact info, could not find what I was looking for. I have the latest version of Blocs. How do you people defeat bots or spammers to lift contact info? My first site turned out to be a catastrophe from this point of view. Thank you for your replies if you can, and sorry for the newbeeish flavour, I am a newbee!
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The first step would be to identify the bots visiting your site(s). For that, you could look into the access logs and search for “bot” in them. This will probably result in several results.
You could then block them using your .htaccess file (on a linux server).
Example:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} SemRush [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
In this case “SemRush” would be the name of the bot you’re trying to block.
How are they lifting your contact info? Is it published on the page or are they just spamming you through your contact form? If you are using that email address to register for things it’s a dead cert to receive spam.
CloudFlare used to be pretty effective at blocking things like Semrush.
It’s best to never publish an actual email address on your website. However, I accept that in some jurisdictions its is mandatory to publish an email address online. If you are obliged to publish an email address, there are a few things you can do to minimise the problem. Firstly, you can show your email address as an image ( a little basic but quite effective). The other thing you can do is use an alias email address that connects to your main email account. If you get a lot of spam email, simply delete the alias and create a new one. (can be inconvenient, but puts you in control). The best solution, however, is to use a box trapper on your email address. This effectively responds to all non-whitelisted email addresses with a message asking the sender to verify themselves before delivering the message. This requires manually verifying through a link in the response email. When the user verifies, their original email will be delivered to your inbox and will whitelist the sender in your email account.
The box trapper function can be found in the email section of most cPanels. It will allow you to customise all the messages and responses. It also allows you to set the minimum spam score for triggering the box trapper and will also allow you set a minimum time frame before unverified emails are automatically deleted.
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Thank you guys for answers… I have not yet actualized a solution, and will report back when it will be the case.
thank you. looking into this at the moment!
not really lifting, simply that my inbox fills with empty messages from the site’s forms… i am building several sites at the moment, an I am trying to do it right from the outset… You are also talking to a beginner server side managementwise
thank you for your answer. are you actually doing this?
Guys I actually found a great page on the subject to defeat bots lifting info: obfuscation - Making email addresses safe from bots on a webpage? - Stack Overflow
Hope it helps
Guys, thank you again for helping… In the end, I found this solution: the CSS part Protect your email and phone number from spam bots
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