StephanRoss.com

We have a problem on the Renown.org website I manage of being a magnet for email spam. Specifically, lots of our users put their email addresses directly onto pages they edit with our CMS. Our email admins have begged us to pull them to spare the mail exchange servers.

Obviously you can build a form for each address or a more complex contact management system, but that's a lot of overhead for a webmaster just to let content editors plunk an email address on your site. I've seen a few image and/or javascript-based email obfuscators, but not many that I've liked or were easy enough for the average user to implement without my help. That's where the reCAPTCHA Mailhide tool comes in.

While looking for a ColdFusion CAPTCHA tool to block spam on my Renown Health Online Art Gallery site, I found the reCAPTCHA Mailhide tool. It is extremely easy to use and generates simple copy and paste HTML that worked right inside our CMS's WYSIWYG editor (Tiny MCE, which I also use in Joomla).

As an example, click the ellipsis in my address to get a reCAPTCHA challenge: step...@gmail.com.

And if you put forms on the web and are getting spam, then check out reCAPTCHA. As they say, "stop spam, read books".