Why We Use “Spambot-Proof”
Email Addresses

A “bot” is a small computer program (a small bit of code) that acts independently (like a robot, hence the nickname). “Spambots” are Internet bots that scour web pages searching for email addresses. When they find a valid email address, they send it back to their “home,” which is to say whoever sent it out onto the web searching. These email addresses are then added to lists which are sold to spammers, and voilà, you start getting more spam. (These spambots don’t actually “read” web pages—they’re just “dumb” computer code— what they do is look for a string of text that matches this format: anything@something.tld (where .tld = .com, .org, .gov, etc…)

Obviously, this is not good. It’s one of the tragedies of the modern world, that spammers are destroying email. Oh well… In order to help prevent this, you can mask email addresses by displaying them as anything (at) something (dot) tld, which a human can read and understand, but a spambot will pass over as more meaningless text. Alas, in order to make an actual functioning email hyperlink, you need to put the actual email address in the code of the web page—which then defeats the purpose, since spambots read the code of the web page (not what is visually displayed)!

So we are stuck with having to ask you to deal with non-functioning email links. So very sorry. You can save yourself a little bit of typing by copying and pasting the “spambot-proof” email, then replacing the (at) with an @ symbol and (dot) with a . period. And there are no spaces in email addresses!

Thank you for your understanding.

—The CAG SLR5 Webmaster