obfuscating email addresses on www.netbeans.org

Hi all,

Just FYI : I've recently spent some time on this issue :

    http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=43615

Basically hiding email addresses from bot harvesters (or at least
attempting to).  No soloution is 100% effective, and it is only
effective until someone writes a smarter mail harverster :-/

Anyway, this is live now on www - if you view the source of a
page with an email address you'll see the characters of the
address "disguised" as decimal html entities; there's also a
javascript trick to try to hide it even more.  The browser
interprets those entities and displays them as normal characters,
so browsing the page everything looks normal.  Spam harversters
don't parse the source like browsers, so they jsut see the codes
and wont recognise them as email addresses.

This is nice, but since we link to testwww for printable versions,
all email addresses there need to be hidden also.  I'll try to
convert existing emails there.  I'll set up an "obfuscator" tool
somewhere so that if you need to use an email address in your
content you can visit this tool, paste the email you need, and it
will generate the html entity code for you to use in your testwww
html.  I'll notify the list when that is done.

This was a little tricky to implement, so please do keep your eye
open for any problems, and let me know of anything strange.

Note this is all for plain html *content* only, I cannot do
anything about email addresses appearing eg in mailing list
archives etc.  That's something Collab have to change in
SourceCast, for info about that see :

    http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=33201


-- 
Jack Catchpoole
NetBeans/Sun Microsystems
http://www.netbeans.org/