Has Google Broken JavaScript Spam Munging?

Baxil writes "For years now, Javascript munging has been a useful tool to share email addresses on the Web without exposing them to spammers. However, Google is now apparently evaluating Javascript when assembling summary text for web pages' listings, and publishing the un-munged email addresses to the world; and spammers have started to take advantage of this kind service." Anyone else seen this affecting their carefully protected email addresses?

Comments

Contact Me Form

[Jason Levine]

A better method is to have a Contact Me form that doesn't display your e-mail address anywhere on it. Yes, you'll get spammers filling it out, but you can cut down on those with some simple techniques. For example, make a "Phone Number" field and set the CSS display attribute to none. Normal users won't see this field and won't fill it out. Spam-bots will see it and attempt to fill it out. Then, have your submission script silently fail to send to e-mail if the "Phone Number" is filled out. (If you toss an error, the spammer might figure out the trick.) No method is fool-proof, of course, but this is much better than putting your e-mail address on your webpage and hoping that someone doesn't de-mung it.

Re:Mung

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try, but that rule only applies to "[^ng]g$" words.

beg + ing = begging
dig + ing = digging
hog + ing = hogging
rag + ing = ragging
tug + ing = tugging

but it doesn't apply "[n]g$", because the n modifies the sound of the g, and gg$ is uncommon enough that it's an exception in itself.

bang + ing = banging
bring + ing = bringing
(egg + ing = egging)
hang + ing = hanging
long + ing = longing
ping + ing = pinging
sing + ing = singing

Unfortuantely we don't have many examples of "ung$" because most of the words of that form are either nouns (e.g. dung, lung, young) or past participles (e.g. clung, hung, sung), so their present participles are generally formed from the present tense "ing$" form of word (e.g. cling/clung/clinging, hang/hung/hanging, sing/sung/singing), etc.

Note that we do have plenty of examples of "unge$" forming "unging$":

expunge + ing = expunging
lounge + ing = lounging
lunge + ing = lunging
plunge + ing = plunging
scrounge + ing = scrounging

So that's plenty of reason to believe that the rule is "unge + ing = unging", despite the fact that "inge + ing" can be either "inging" or "ingeing" depending on the word (and in some cases both are valid):

binge + ing = binging or bingeing (both are valid; look it up)
cringe + ing = cringing
impinge + ing = impinging
singe + ing = singeing
twinge + ing = twinging or twingeing (both are valid)

Therefore I strongly contend that:

mung + ing = munging
munge + ing = munging or mungeing (both are valid)

You may dispute the claim above, but there's no disputing:

mung + ed = munged
munge + ed = munged

:)