pauloffrance

Yes I agree nothing is airtight. I think that most bots do not read JavaScript so encasing an email address inside a script will help a great deal. Some people do not like to use forms so for this reason we put our email address out there. Unfortunately email addresses and the like do get exchanged on open forums etc, and so I just admit defeat and live with the spam. We get most of our business by way of the internet so I am prepared to live with the consequences. We are moving our hosting to a new server and during this I will be removing the email addresses on our guestbook for an altogether different reason. We have had a few cases where potential guests have emailed old guests and asked questions like "how nice are the people who run the B&B?" and "was the food any good?" and that was just the ones we heard about. Strange really, everyone knows the food is great and that we are the nicest people on the planet (just kidding!). If there is one thing that I have learnt during all my years of being involved in computers, is that no matter how clever you think you are, there is always someone just that little bit sharper that will take you down. Some very large companies have spent gazillions on protecting their software etc, only to find it cracked within hours of launching. So, as much as we protect our email addresses, it only takes one bot somewhere to find it and then it's all over, prepare for the spam! Believe me, someone will post it somewhere or have their address book attacked by a virus, so I may as well make good use of it. Eventually tougher laws will be brought to fight this problem, but that is an altogether different topic..... Nice to talk with you.

Hi I'm Paul and http://bb.lowernormandy.com is mine. The guest book is filled out online if our guests feel the need to leave a comment. There is no way we would transfer comments from our guest book to the online version. The guest book we use encodes the email addresses left by our guests so as to make them unreadable by harvesters. Also on top of this I use .htaccess methods to prevent direct access to the original information. We do take our guests security very seriously. If anyone is interested in protecting their published email addresses within their own sites go take a look at this page http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php and try using the javascript version. Good luck all, and for those with B&B's I wish you a good season.