I’ve just rolled out a new version of my ✍️ Reply by Email plug-in. Now with email obfuscation to combat email harvesting & keep your inbox safer! 🛡️

Remember, no solution is 100% foolproof against web scraping spam bots. For best protection, combine with a service like Apple’s Hide My Email!

@sod Thank you. That plugin is crucial on one of my blogs in particular. 👍

@SimonWoods There should be a checkbox, Obfuscate email address, in the settings. If you can't see it, you're probably not on the latest version (1.2.0).

I won't go into the implementation details here, as that kind of defeats the purpose of trying to obfuscate the email. I don't want to help the script kiddies too much. If they absolutely want to scrape email addresses off the lovely people here, at least they have to work for it and figure out the scheme by themselves.

It's JavaScript-based, though, so if that's a no-no for anyone, they should disable the feature and the plug-in will revert to the previous version's functionality.

@sod ugh I completely missed it 🤦‍♂️ It's like the parsing part of my brain went on a break lol

The thing I was wondering, hopefully to be more specific and less helpful to the scrapers, is whether this pairs well with the idea of keeping your email address off your site; I know some people use that tactic in an effort to avoid scraping and the like. Then what you could do, in whatever way each person prefers to say it, is point people to the button rather than revealing your address or using a contact form or whatever.

@SimonWoods It's not a contact form, so your email address will be in the HTML. But as ciphertext (not plaintext).

@sod Hi! Another plugin of yours I love. I just switched to the Bear theme, and I no longer see the links that this plugin and your Conversation on Micro.blog plugin append at the end of each post, like they did when I was using a different theme. Could this be an issue with the Bear theme?

@cygnoir Hey, I'm glad you like my plug-ins. 😊 There are a few themes with built-in support but for most, you have to include the links yourself where you want them. A code snippet has to be pasted in using a custom theme.

The process is documented here for Reply by email and here for Conversation on Micro.blog. You have to be signed in to Micro.blog for those links to work.

Let me know if anything is unclear and we will figure it out together.

@sod Thank you so much. I will give it a try first and let you know if I need additional help!

@sod Got it working. Thanks again! Next I am trying to figure out how to add replies to my post pages, but if it works in a similar way to adding your plugins, I'm hopeful.

@cygnoir As the replies is first-party functionality, I would say this is a bug in the Bear theme. I'm currently doing some theme-related work for @manton and will take a look at this. So you can just sit back and relax, replies will be included in a future update to the Bear theme.

If you're eager to get replies going, paste the following snippet where you want them to show up (probably right below my plug-in links):

{{ if .Site.Params.include_conversation }}
<script src="https://micro.blog/conversation.js?url={{ .Permalink }}"></script>
{{ end }}

@sod I can be patient. ☺️ Thank you for following up!