Preventing email spam

If you publish an email address on a website it can open up the possibility of E-mail address harvesting. There are a number of techniques for publishing an email link on the web that can make it more difficult for spammers to abuse the email link. On a MediaWiki website, such as Wikiversity, the easiest method is to use the  feature. For example, to include a link to the email of User:Example you would use the wiki link Special:EmailUser/Example. This assumes that User:Example has entered a valid email in.

Another option is to use a tool such as Obfuscate Email Address on Web Page. If we enter the example email address  it returns code that can be inserted in any webpage, including a wiki. It looks like  in the webpage but if you click on edit this page you will see that the plain text of the email address is obfuscated using html markup and appears as   in the source code. Tbis is not guaranteed to work but could provide some measure of protection against address harvesting.

See the links below for a more detailed discussion of different methods to hide email addresses from spammers.