Plan Left

Contact Camo protects email addresses by obfuscating or completely hiding them in both the source code and the DOM.
<h3>What Is It?</h3>
Contact Camo is a plugin for WordPress developed by Plan Left that effectively hides or obfuscates email addresses from scammers, web scrapers and internet bots to help minimize spam and other nefarious, automated actors.
In addition to protecting email addresses, Contact Camo also provides some granular control over how those protected email addresses can be displayed and interacted with by users that are very useful to site builders and also help make site maintenance easier.
<h3>Example Use Cases</h3>
<ul>
<li>Educational Organization with large faculty directories</li>
<li>Nonprofits who need to be accessible without displaying in-content email addresses</li>
<li>Large Organizations who have departmental pages and points of contact but don’t want to maintain multiple contact forms</li>
<li>Anyone who doesn’t want to expose email addresses to the scammers, scrapers and bots of the internet.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Why Did You Make This Plugin?</h3>
We work with many non-profits and educational organizations that need to list contact info in directories on their website. Due to the public visibility of these and their large user base, our clients web properties are under constant threat from spammers and bots. We wanted to ensure that their user directories were safe from these threats while still being functional to visitors. In other words, we needed to hide a bunch of email addresses from the outside world while still allowing the outside world to contact those users via their email address. When we got to developing this plugin, we knew we had to provide a solution that was as bulletproof as possible while allowing our clients and customers the most amount of control over things as practical.
<h4>Ultimately, we needed to create a plugin that would:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Optionally hide or obfuscate email addresses from scrapers and bots securely and confidently. For our use case, email addresses needed to be obfuscated in the source code, the DOM, and in HTTP requests. We took the email address out of the client-side equation completely by just tucking it safely away in the database in a lookup table instead of providing a workaround that simply disguises the email address. We essentially took the email address to a safe house and sent out its representative to interact with the outside world on its behalf. Nobody gets the email, not no way, not no how, see?!?</li>
<li>Provide users with lots of control over the UX of protected email addresses, but without the need for cumbersome configuration. We decided a shortcode with some good options and sensible defaults would foot the bill for most users.</li>
<li>Be performant in capabilities, lightweight in footprint, and opinionated in scope.</li>
</ul>
The client was very pleased with the end-result and so were we. So, we decided to offer it back to the community. Our development team reviewed and scrutinized the existing plugin, found areas for improvements and further customizations, and baked them right in for everyone to use.
<h3>Who Is It For?</h3>
Site administrators and content editors/moderators. Anyone with a WordPress site that would like the peace of mind of knowing that their user’s email addresses are safely hidden from spam bots and other unintended consumers with ill intent. Content creators that don’t want to worry about the complications and time expenditure of dealing with and managing their user base getting spammed from their platform. And especially when any of the above mentioned require some level of control over what’s displayed to their users, who may very well be their customers or clients or patients, etc…It’s for site builders that want protection AND customization without being overwhelmed.
<h3>What Problems Does It Solve?</h3>
Contact Camo hides or obfuscates email addresses in the source code AND the DOM. Not only this, it ensures the unobfuscated email address is never used in any page or ajax request from its originating context; all handling/processing is done server-side. Once obfuscated, the client-side never sees the original email address again (where obfuscated). The obfuscation (key) is a hash that is stored in a lookup table with the original email address.
A few of the limitations we found in some existing (but great) plugins:
<ul>
<li>email address only obfuscated in DOM, but not in source code</li>
<li>email address only obfuscated in source code, but not in the DOM</li>
<li>integrating with a 3rd-party service that scrapes entire pages and performs a search-and-replace of email addresses with obfuscated versions in the source code</li>
<li>email address obfuscation using only html entities replacement</li>
<li>few options for control ling output</li>
<li>no contact form or fallback options</li>
</ul>
<h3>How Does It Work?</h3>
Contact Camo provides a simple shortcode that can be used to manually obfuscate or hide email addresses and control how those email address are presented back to the end-user.
This shortcode’s eventual default output is a clickable link with the obfuscated email address’s generated hash stored in a data attribute. On click, this hash is used to lookup the email address (or generate and store a new hash in your database for that email if one doesn’t already exist) and then open the browser’s configured email client with the “To” field pre-populated with the corresponding email address.
The shortcode accepts several parameters for overriding the default output. Output a button instead of a link, add CSS classes, change the text output, etc… The sky’s the limit for display.
The shortcode also has parameters for displaying an embedded contact form or an optional modal popup contact form instead of a clickable link that opens the browser’s default email client.
<h3>What is Hide vs Obfuscate?</h3>
For our plugin, we wanted to give site administrators the option to either completely hide the email address and never let any end content consumer see any piece of the email, or to hide the email until requested and reveal it in context after a specific action is taken.
<ul>
<li>Hiding the email address: The site visitor will never see the email address, and instead only be presented a popup contact form that submits and mails through ajax. This option totally hides the email, and it will never be revealed unless the emailed recipient emails the form submitter back.</li>
<li>Obfuscating the email address: The site visitor will not see the email address until the contact button (or link) is clicked. On click, the email address will be revealed and the visitor can copy or mail to that address.</li>
</ul>
<h3>What Can I Do With It?</h3>
We chose to err on the side of simplicity, balanced with enough options as to be useful. To this, we default to an anchor tag output, or – if overridden – a clickable button. We give the user control over which of these as well as css classes and an id. The text output is configurable. And with one option, you can have a modal contact form popup when users click on your link. All without showing the email address you want to use, but hide. Hide for real for real. The plugin includes template files if you wish to really change the output, like maybe you want a different wrapper, or need to include some custom data attributes for javascript to use. We thought about adding all that level of configuration to our shortcode, but figured if you were at that point, you’d probably also know how to edit a template file 😉
<h4>Basic Usage:</h4>
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com"]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a basic anchor tag with default text
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" label="Contact Us" form=true button=true]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a clickable button with text that says “Contact Us”.
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" label="Contact Us" form=true button=true popup=true]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a clickable button with text that says “Contact Us” that, when click, pops up a modal contact form
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" subject="ContactCamo" class="mail-icon-lg mail-link"]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a link with default text typographically styled along with an inline mail icon
<ul>
<li><code>[contactcamo email="contact@example.com" id="one-contactcamo-to-rule-them-all" label="Fly, You Fools!" button=true class="btn btn-lg btn-lt-blue mail-icon-sm"]</code></li>
</ul>
output: a large, light blue clickable button with text that says “Fly, You Fools!” along with an inline mail icon
<h4>Shortcode Parameters</h4>
<ul>
<li>
email required string 
the email address to be obfuscated
</li>
<li>
label optional string default=”Email” 
the text output
</li>
<li>
subject optional string 
the text to populate mail subject lines
</li>
<li>
class optional string 
the css class(es) to add to the anchor/button html output, space delimited
</li>
<li>
id optional string 
the css id to add to the anchor/button html output
</li>
<li>
form optional boolean default=false 
if true, output contact form in place of link
</li>
<li>
popup optional boolean default=false 
if true, output link that opens modal contact form on click
</li>
<li>
button optional boolean default=false 
if true, output link as a clickable button instead of an anchor tag
</li>
</ul>
There is also an admin page for Contact Camo. From this page, you can configure where the contact form redirects after form submission.

Contact Camo

Contact Camo protects email addresses by obfuscating or completely hiding them in both the source code and the DOM.

Spam is website publishers #1 concern, we wanna share our and our visitors’ emails to those who should have access to them, but don’t want spam harvesters stealing them and sending garbage to us. A lot of techniques had been developed to hide our emails from these delinquents, while having them shown to real people.
And together with spam harvesting, on 15 June 2009, Matt Cutts, a well known software engineer of Google, announced that Google Bot will no longer ignore nofollowed links for PageRank, and now we lose PR/link juice for every link we add to our pages, even if we use rel=”nofollow” on them. So, now we must hide links from Search Engines too!
I’ve been searching for an ultimate obfuscation solution for both emails and URLs, that would be user-friendly for me the content publisher, and for my visitors. I’ve seen a lot of solutions, some that inspired me, but none that would fit my needs. It was time to start coding 🙂
<a href="http://Hikari.ws/email-url-obfuscator/" rel="nofollow ugc">Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator</a> plugin obfuscates emails and URL links, to hide them from spam harvesters and Search Endigne crawlers. It uses ROT13 or cc8b to encode each link while PHP is building the page, then uses JavaScript to decode it and show it to the user. If JavaScript is not available, it uses CSS to hide them.
It doesn’t use shortcodes, it works directly over HTML links, parsing and obfuscating them. By default it filters all texts in posts, comments, comments authors and text widgets, but you can manually use it anywhere you want.
Basically, Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin searches for links that contain URLs and emails on their <code>href</code> atrribute. For each found link, it is replaced by an obfuscated string, and a JavaScript function is called, having in its parameters the required data for JavaScript to decode and recreate the original link.
The obfuscated string is then merged back by CSS to a readable URL/email text, so that human visitors can read it while spam harvesters and searchbots will not be able to detect it as a valid email/URL.
And, for JavaScript-enabled visitors, this string is replaced by a link with the exact same behavior and attributes of your original link, so that they can interact with it as if there was no obfuscation in place! 
(Really, there is no way to diferenciate an obfuscated link generated by JavaScript from the original link, unless the HTML document’ source is verified or a development tool as FireBug is used!)
It uses 4 obfuscation techniques, 2 JavaScript solutions and 2 CSS alternatives for JavaScript-disabled browsers.
For CSS, it may revert the link string while PHP is building the page and then CSS reverts it back. Or it may add garbage text between the link, and CSS prevents this extra text from being rendered, so any user-agent that doesn’t use CSS can’t find the link but browsers show it clearly.
Now, when JavaScript is available, it is delivered with the original link, encoded using ROT13 or cc8b by PHP. The link is then decoded back by JavaScript and added to the page, so that real users don’t even notice the original link was replaced.
And, disregarding the used technique, we content publishers must do nothing different while building our content, just activate the plugin and it does everything else for us 🙂
I dedicate Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator to Ju, my beloved frient ^-^
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Works instantly, no need to edit your posts to have your links obfuscated: Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator plugin automatically detects them and starts obfuscating as soon as it is activated.</li>
<li>Unobstructive JavaScript: links are obfuscated and shown for visitors with and without JavaScript, forget those “you must enabled javascript to see this email” messages!</li>
<li>They are real links!: any attribute you can use in an <code><a></code> tag you also can use in obfuscated links (JavaScript version only).</li>
<li>Customization: CSS doesn’t let we have real links, but we can at least choose if our obfuscated text will have email only, text only, or both!</li>
<li>XHTML 1.1 valid: obfuscated links and JavaScript code are valid even in XHTML 1.1 standard. It makes the plugin valid inclusive in HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Transitional and HTML5!</li>
</ul>
<h4>Advantages over other obfuscation solutions</h4>
<ul>
<li>Your visitors will see your emails and URLs even if they keep JavaScript disabled.</li>
<li>Automatic: you don’t need to take special actions to start obfuscating, as using shortcodes in place of links or an external tool to get your obfuscation code. Just normally use your links in your posts and let the plugin do the rest!</li>
<li>Sitewide: instantly works in your existing posts, pages, comments and text widgets, just after you activate it.</li>
<li>Diversity: for each link, it randomly chooses between 2 CSS and 2 JavaScript obfuscation methods, making it harder for spammers to crack it.</li>
<li>Extensible: you can call it manually, and add it to other plugins and themes filters.</li>
<li>Customizable: use custom parameters to force or avoid specific links from being obfuscated, and to define how non-JavaScript obfuscation will behave.</li>
</ul>

Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator

Email and normal links are obfuscated, hiding them from spambots. It automatically encodes each link, then uses JavaScript to decode and show them.

Contact Camo vs Hikari Email & URL Obfuscator