Improved Email Protection

obfuscation
#1

Having used reCAPTCHA’s (now deprecated) Mailhide service in the past, I was curious about how CloudFlare was so seamlessly protecting emails. After some investigation I was disappointed to find that CloudFlare’s email obfuscation technique is significantly inferior to reCAPTCHA, so much so that I’m struggling to even understand the purpose of it.

The technique that’s used would only be effective if it were deployed on a small number of sites and relatively unknown. Since CloudFlare is used by a large percentage of websites, I think it’s safe to assume at this point that anyone who’s serious about scraping emails would be aware CloudFlare and easily able to figure out how to circumvent the obfuscation.

Are there any plans to improve email protection? Ideally there would be another level of protection offered similar to reCAPTCHA where an email would not be unmasked until a user clicks on it. Then CloudFlare’s data could be leveraged to require “suspicious” users to solve a CAPTCHA while still allowing most users to unmask emails without any additional prompts.

#2

I don’t use it because it adds yet another resource to my site that takes time to load. I also find it’s slightly broken on some of my sites.

I don’t use ReCAPTCHA or NoCAPTCHA because, as above, it adds yet another resource that takes time to load. And I don’t want to depend on external services for my site to function.

That being said, obfuscation and hoops may be the wrong approach. The fact that an email address is visible on a webpage makes most common use cases difficult. Maybe some sort of email proxy service would be a better approach. Or even a Cloudflare App that would pop up an email link that would be clickable.

#3

Hi i am new here and want to ask about a issue i am facing but i dont see any option to create and post new question …please some one tell me how

#4

We use trust levels and permissions here to ease new users into the community experience. More details can be found here:

I’ve also upgraded your trust level so you should be able to post new topics yourself. But be sure to search first to see if anyone is already discussing.