Hi. I’m not sure if it a new thing, but i have just been made aware of the encoding that blurs out the email address.
It’s a great idea, but confuses customers, since there is nothing to tell them that all you have to do is click on it to see it. Why is there not a pop up that tells them what to do, please? I have disabled it for now, but appreciate that it could help stop spammers finding my email address. Is there more about this that i can learn, so that it suits my security wished and my customers’ ease of using my website?
What I’m trying to say is that it’s not intuitive to everyone to click on a blurred image. One of my customers was quite upset about it – and I understand. They feel excluded.
OK yes, not a pop up – what was I thinking, I hate them too, but something to give them a clue how to see the email address. How are people supposed to know that they can click on it to clear the blur? How about text next to it, click here to email, or something? I’ve had to turn it off – it’s just confusing to my website users.
@beckseden that’s why I’m thinking about the second option to unblurre – visitors scrolls page to the area of with the blurred email, plugins starts ublurring process automatically and in the background. So, after 1-2 seconds visitors gets the email without any extra actions. What do you think about this?
The idea with the text does not look perfect for me, I believe some website owners do not want to have any technical marks/texts on a site. Anyway, give me a day or two to think on this.
We have analyzed the issue of automatically decoding email addresses on the page. Unfortunately, this approach has two major drawbacks:
Weakened protection against bots – Some bots will receive the page with the already decoded email address, reducing the effectiveness of the protection. Increased server load – The automatic decoding process will add additional processing load, which will increase based on website traffic, potentially slowing down the site’s performance. We plan to modify the blur effect to make it more evident that an email address is hidden and provide multiple display options for encrypted email addresses:
Asterisk format – Example: co****ate@exle***.com
Blur effect – The email remains blurred until interacted with.
Customizable text format – A predefined text (e.g., “Click to decrypt email”), which website owners can modify to fit their needs. Thank you!
Hello, just want to let know I got an upset customer yesterday as well. It’s very, very confusing to see a blurred image of the email address, and some message that it need to be decoded which requires javascript to be turned on.
Is this a new feature, that is automatically turned on? Have not seen it before…
What’s the best way to reassure the customer?
Guess I’m gonna turn this feature off – if that’s possible.
Wondering if I need to check all customers sites right now…
I would also like to mention that we are working to change the blur effect on the encoded emails. It will make it more obvious that the email address is hidden. Also, we will add different display options for the decoded email addresses.
We’ll send you a version with those changes as soon as it’s ready.
This reply was modified 10 months, 4 weeks ago by amagsumov.
I had the email address in the footer of the website. Now I changed it to a text ‘Get in touch’ which links to the contact page, where people can find a contact form. For now that’s okay.
Under the “Encode contact data” option, we have added an “Encoder obfuscation mode” option that allows you to choose the visual effect for the encoded email. In this option you can choose 3 working modes for the “Encode contact data” option: 1) Blur effect 2) Replace with * symbol 3) Replace with the custom text. To learn more about each mode, click the question mark icon next to the setting for additional details.
You can find this option here: WordPress Admin Page —> Settings —> Anti-Spam by CleanTalk —> Advanced Settings —> Encoder obfuscation mode
I have checked it, and I think this update offers great additional options. I’ll check with my clients to ask what they prefer.
If understand it right: once a visitor clicks the mail button, a pop up appears and a process is started where CleanTalk checks somehow if the visitor is a human or a (spam) bot? And if it’s a (spam) bot, what happens next; does the email client not get opened? Something like that?
There’s one little thing that could be improved a little bit: right now, the pop up says (in Dutch) “Anti-Spam by CleanTalk. De magie is onderweg, wacht een paar seconden” with a button “Duidelijk”. Which is something like “Anti-Spam by CleanTalk. The magic is on it’s way, wait a few seconds with a button “Understood”. Nothing seems to happen, until the button get’s clicked. It would be nice if the texts could be set/translated. I’d prefer something like (in English): “Anti-Spam check by CleanTalk. We’re checking if you’re a bot…” with a button “Click to proceed”. Or something similar. And translatable to Dutch/custom text.
Anyway: thanks, this is an improvement.
Oh, last but not least: after the update, the encode option gets checked by default; I’m not sure whether it was checked before, or not.
