2017-02-02

Obfuscate email addresses for Spambots and Crawlers

By utilizing css text-direction property text can be transformed into useless jibberish for crawlers and spambots.

.obfuscate {
  unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
  direction: rtl;
  text-align: left;
}

This will make the content appear reverted.

<span class="obfuscate">Hello</span>

"Hello" will be displayed as "olleH".

To make the text appear correct for your users, you either enter the text reversed, or make use of a programming language.

Example for Rails, output will be readable by humans as expected:

<span class="obfuscate">
  <%= "Really sensitive data".reverse %>
</span>

also known as text reverse inception :)