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

*rolleyes*

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, queue the obfuscation != security thing. If your email address is carefully protected, it is not displayed on a web page, obfuscated or not.

"Google indexes correctly rendered page"

[RichardDeVries]

That should be the title. That is, if it were newsworthy. Which it isn't.

Welcome to the club

[fataugie]

Dear Google:

Welcome to the "Impossible to do anything right" club.

Regards,

Wal-Mart,
Microsoft,
G. W. Bush

It's not google, it's the web developers

[Punto]

nowadays, half of the pages I try to visit don't render at all without javascript. Somtimes the main content is missing (you just get the headline, the links that go on the sides, and the ads), somtimes it's just a blank page. It seems like all these traditional news organizations just _have_ to be "web 2.0" to appear relevant again.

Google needs to index the page, they don't have much choice.

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.

Pay to email

[Viking Coder]

How about "pay to email"?

I register with a pay-to-email site, and give it my actual email address. It gives me my new publicly visible email address. Anyone who wants to can send me an email through this service if they pay me an amount of money that I set. After I receive the email, I can refund the sender. The pay-to-email site takes a 10% cut on all un-refunded emails.

Sound like a winner?

Re:Mung

[Anonymous Coward]

>The wikipedia page also links to munge - modify until not guessed easily -
> which I guess is what the original person intended

Then the original poster is a chimp and so are you. If you aren't aware that adding ~e may change the meaning of a word, I should come round and rap your ears.

Some robots are more equal than others

[Cajun Hell]

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.

This only works for as long as spammers don't care about it. I think anyone who can figure out the HTML resulting from javascript, can also figure out the style of an element.

What's really funny about this problem is that we used to talk about using captchas to tell the robots apart from the meatbags, so that you could discriminate against robots. But now people want the robots to make sense of their page (so that they get referrals from Google) but they don't want the robots to make sense of their page (so that their email box doesn't get referrals from spambot). You're on the web or you're not. Choose.

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

:)