Finding my way at WordPress.com and then sharing my observations with friends who at times are like me... lost!

Up to now, we still see people displaying their email addresses in their blog posts. And these include columnists of major news sites which we find very disappointing.

The practice of displaying email addresses in web pages is an open invitation to spammers who use spambots which crawl on webpages to harvest anything that looks like an email address.

There are several methods to fight off spambots.

One method is to use an online contact form which obfuscates the recipient email address.

If you are using WordPress, there are a number of “contact form” plugins.

Here are two of those available in the WordPress community which we have been using in our websites:

• WP-Spamfree eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature which can easily be installed in two minutes or less.
• Contact Form 7 which allows you to design as many contact forms you want in your website. It also supports features like AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and file uploading.

With contact form plugins that can easily obfuscate email addresses, are you still displaying your email address on your site?

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