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Email Obfuscation Plugin [message #168498]

Sun, 12 May 2013 03:15

cpreston

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When importing 10s of thousands of emails into a public forum, we thought it really important to obfuscate email addresses so that people who emailed a mailing list didn't get their email address displayed to the world. That's what this plugin does.

First it identifies email addresses using a pretty good regular expression. Then, each email address is obfuscated by replacing @ to " $RAN1 at $RAN2" and '.' to " $RAN1 dot $RAN2 " where $RAN1 and $RAN2 are a fixed number of random alphanumeric characters. The length of the alphanumeric characters can be specified in the plugin.

This does not modify the email addresses in the database, It just obfuscates them when they are published. When unpublished, the email id's would appear in their normal state.

This makes the obfuscation completely random to make it harder to scrape, but it allows a human to read it just fine if they want to take the time. Make sense?

Test it and let me know what you think?

Attachment: email_obfuscate.plugin.zip
(Size: 2.49KB, Downloaded 1475 times)

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Re: Email Obfuscation Plugin [message #168499 is a reply to message #168498]

Sun, 12 May 2013 04:09

naudefj

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Great idea! Some sugestions:

1. The code to rebuild themes can be removed (not required)
2. Remove reference to 'Fudla'
3. The regex doesn't catch e-mail addresses in posts (or maybe not all of them).

PS: Can we include this plugin with the next release?

Best regards.
Frank

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Re: Email Obfuscation Plugin [message #168502 is a reply to message #168499]

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:27

cpreston

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Well it's certainly supposed to catch e-mail addresses in posts. Wink

Can you give me some examples of addresses it doesn't catch?

We can release this plugin however you'd like.

[Updated on: Sun, 12 May 2013 12:28]

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Re: Email Obfuscation Plugin [message #168551 is a reply to message #168544]

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:24

cpreston

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Here is the 1.0.1 version that I will be using in production. We removed the lines you specified and changed the regex to find email addresses that were changed to @

I also came up with the idea of having the length of the random string be random and implemented that, and selected it by default. Admins can use that value, no random string, or a number from 1-3.

Attachment: email_obfuscate.plugin.zip
(Size: 2.84KB, Downloaded 1403 times)

[Updated on: Tue, 21 May 2013 11:25]

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Re: Email Obfuscation Plugin [message #168553 is a reply to message #168551]

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:32

naudefj

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Looks a lot better! But it can be further improved by skipping post/edit pages. Try to edit a message with an e-mail address to see why this would be important.

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