[oneeyedpauly]

Ok, this is an issue that has been bugging me for months. When I first set up my web design site I added various contact details including telephone numbers and an e-mail address. Unfortunatley, in the early days before I knew much about web design I didn't realise you had to encrypt your e-mail address to stop spam bots. Needless to say I had Indian and Chinese outsourcing companies spamming me on a daily basis, I was even getting phone calls at this point.

After months of torment I decided to remove my telephone number and e-mail address from the site, I now have only a contact form with hexadecimal values for the e-mail address. This has stopped a lot of spammers but the odd one still slips through, probably on account of them having my e-mail address now.

I am in the process of developng a new site and will be adding Captcha to my e-mail form to further protect myself. I would ideally like to add my telephone number or perhaps Skype details (or both) to the site but not having really used Skype in the past I'm not sure of the best thing to do? I feel as my site is trying to attract local businesses, not having a telephone number is going to have an obvious negative impact. My new site will be more personal, as I am designing as a portfolio site as opposed to making it out to be a big business, which it is not, hopefully this will help too, but I have my doubts.

Ant thoughts or suggestions would be gratefully received?

[Meow]

Make sure you are signed up at The Telephone Preference Service.

I believe it's only UK based calls it'll prevent, though.

[Dorset Web Designs]

On my web form I have a hidden box area and if that is filled (by spam bots) I don't receive an email as I have instructed the submit.php...just an idea.

As far as telephone numbers are concerned I have registered mine on the Telephone Preference Service so I don't received any unwanted calls. The odd 1 or 2 get through but as soon as I say I am on TPS they apologise and hang up.

[oneeyedpauly]

Dorset Web Designs, on Apr 9 2009, 12:48, said:

On my web form I have a hidden box area and if that is filled (by spam bots) I don't receive an email as I have instructed the submit.php...just an idea.

As far as telephone numbers are concerned I have registered mine on the Telephone Preference Service so I don't received any unwanted calls. The odd 1 or 2 get through but as soon as I say I am on TPS they apologise and hang up.

Thanks for the advice. I just registered on the TPS site and apparently my number already is TPS registered and I didn't even know. It's useful to know that if you quote TPS at the callers they will get the hint.

[Sam G]

As others have said, the TPS.

With regards stopping spammers emailing you, go to http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/form and use their script to give you encoded output.