Web Cal Plus can automatically cloak your email addresses hiding them
from spam robots.
Why is this important? There are spam robots that
systematically cull the internet for mailing addresses that are displayed on
websites. It is very easy to write a spam robot by simply looking for the text
"mailto" within a website and then storing the email address. Sophisticated
spam robots will also try to apply context to the email address to put you on a
list for spam that is somewhat related to the content of your website. For
example if you have website dealing with real estate, spam robots can associate
your email address in the real estate category and thus send you real estate
oriented junk mail. Junk email senders will purchase lists of email addresses
related to real estate and chances are your email address will appear on that
list.
How does Web Cal Plus cloak your email addresses? It
simply creates Javascript code that fools the spam robots. The spam robots
never see the keyword "mailto" within the html text therefore your email
address will not get published or sold. The cool thing is that the website
still behaves normally in that your users can still click on your email link
and send you email. It's only the spam robots that are fooled.
For example check out the following email address link. If you click
on View Source within your browser you will see a bunch of codes where the
MAILTO is supposed to be. It's addressed to someone at somewhere.com. The
codes look something like the following:
someon
You may click on the following link as it will bring up your email
program with the addressee of someone@somewhere.com
These codes will confuse the spam robots but will enable your users
to functionally click the mailing address link.
How do you setup Web Cal Plus to take advantage of this feature?
There are two places - in the Settings, Calendar Settings, Admin Tab you'll see
a prompt to cloak the webmaster's name on the bottom of each webpage. Click
that option.
The second place is on the Settings, Calendar Settings, Generation
Tab where you'll see the prompt to use cloaking technology for imbedded mailto
email addresses. Make sure that one is also checked. So when you
type in a new event, in the notes section type in
mailto:joe@schmoe.com and it will
appear underlined and in the color blue. When you generate your calendar
pages it will be cloaked using Javascript.
