Bristlecone Web

Fight SPAM! This plugin helps to ensure that your website authors and editors will not become victim to email harvesting bots by posting email addresses on the website. By using images rather than text, you will offer a higher level of security (arguably) against email harvesting robots. Here is the logic

1. It takes a robot upwards of a second or more to decode an image
2. Each web page has many images
3. Each website has many pages
4. By the time the robot is finished crawling a site it might have spent several minutes.
5. Its simply too costly on the spammer's system resources just to attempt to collect a single email address.
6. Also, since this bot allows administrators to set their own fonts, it is much more difficult for a spammer to build a script which will decode all joomla websites.

Of course, the very best way, is to get the authors to simply direct emails to the contact forms built into Joomla, but quite often they will forget. Joomla does offer protection by default, but without this plugin, it does not support images.

Features:

1. Use any font you wish!  TTF or OTF supported.
2. Images are created in .png format to support transparency, or a specific background color
3. Change the font size; make the email images big or small!
4. Change the colors to whatever you want.
5. All changes can be done through the mambot administration panel
   

How does it work?  Its simple! Emails are automatically converted without any special work.  Users don't even need to be aware that the emails will be converted! For example:

nore...@example.com was automatically converted from plain text to an image just by typing it into the content editor.  No special code needed!  It also works with mailto and other email link formats.  The script will cache the images automatically and use the cached images as available until you change the email or change your settings in the mambot.

Note: This software is supplied without warranty whatsoever.  By using this software, you are using entirely at your own risk and hold all authors of the script harmless for any and all liability.

To install:

1. Unpublish the default email cloak bot (Mambot Name: Email Cloaking / File Name: mosemailcloak)
2. Publish josBWrewi bot
3. Configure the bot with your preferences

This bot supports any TTF or OTF font. This enables you to get creative, or use a font which is much harder for a bot to decode. Cursive fonts should work well, and make emails more prominent to the website visitors.

Current Version
 bot_josbwrewi_v11b 17/08/2007 27.64 Kb

*fixed for sites not installed in the server root

Old Version(s)
 bot_josbwrewi_v1b 26/06/2007  27.61 Kb