Hiding Telephone numbers on a webpage

[barleytwist]

How can I obscure a telephone number from harvesting bots (or whatever they're called) like one can with an email address? Or is it necessary?

[felgall]

If it is in the web page where people can see it then the bots can too. If you don't want bots to see it then don't place it in a page the bots can access.

[ralph.m]

I guess you could at least use an image; although, since real people can read it, they can then do with it what they please.

[cooper.semantics]

I guess you could at least use an image; although, since real people can read it, they can then do with it what they please.

True, i've done something like this before

[rguy84]

I guess you could at least use an image; although, since real people can read it, they can then do with it what they please.

unless of course they are blind and use speech output for using a computer

[barleytwist]

That leaves me thinking that I will leave off the national code bit (01925 UK No.) and put it at the end as "zero, one, nine, two, nine.

What about that idea?

[rguy84]

You could say country/national code 01925 at the end, if somebody doesn't know the code and is blind they may get confused on what the random numbers are. Or you could use html entities for numbers.

[felgall]

If the spammer can read it in the page then they can add it into their autodialer. Just because their spambot isn't able to extract the phone number automatically doesn't mean it can't tell there is a phone number there and report the page for manual extraction.

[C. Ankerstjerne]

I'm thinking it would make little sense to spend time and money to build a bot which harvests phone numbers, when an autodialer can easily go through every possible phone number.

[felgall]

It might if you wanted to target a specific industry.

[C. Ankerstjerne]

Fair enough - but then, wouldn't it be easier to find the numbers on the websites yourself, rather than writing a bot which can analyse a websites contents to figure out which industry it belongs to?

[felgall]

Fair enough - but then, wouldn't it be easier to find the numbers on the websites yourself, rather than writing a bot which can analyse a websites contents to figure out which industry it belongs to?

It quite possibly would be easier to do just that. In which case any attempt to hide the phone number from bots would be even more pointless.

[barleytwist]

I have put the final (local) part of the number next to the respective position and the national code elsewhere. I seemed to have been worrying about nothing as I thought there were harvesters out there. A reader would pick up the first part before the rest.

[AlexDawson]

I wouldn't say there aren't harvesters out there, because there are, however the chances are you are unlikely to get spammed via the phone because in the UK the telephone networks are much more restrictive about people who start mass dialling phone numbers, in fact the network operator would more than likely involve the police in cases of fraud or autodialing sales services. I know BT would dump them on one of those call blocking systems so it would be filtered.

[Stevie D]

How can I obscure a telephone number from harvesting bots (or whatever they're called) like one can with an email address? Or is it necessary?

I don't think it's necessary. I have had my mobile phone number on a website periodically for several years, and I get very few unwanted calls on it. I doubt that those are down to the website, because I was getting them beforehand as well!