botex | Obfuscate email addresses and other personal data

botex is a TypeScript library. botex has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

Obfuscate email addresses and other personal data, so bots can't scrape them. Some personal information like email addresses or phone numbers, should never appear in plain text in your website's source code, so bots can't scrape them. Otherwise your contact information is in danger of being the target of spam mails or sms. This is where botex comes in. Using it's cli or webapp, or using the library server side, you can hide your personal contact info from bots. Usually, this is done by base64 encoding the email or tel strings and only decoding them when a user clicks on a mailto link for example. But scraping bots have improved and can nowadays automatically decipeher base64 or other simple ciphers, such as cesar ciphers. botex obfuscates personal information by using a key - that can be any string - to scramble the input. Doing that, it makes it much harder for bots to deobfuscate the data, as they'd first need to find out that you're using botex and then not only find the encoded information, but also the key for it. Specialized bots would first have to be developed to do this, which is hopefully to much of a hassle for hackers to be done. botex tries to be a compromise between being secure (it's not securely encrypting anything, but hopefully annoying bots enough to give up) and being simple (the functions are straight forward and the lib much smaller than 1kb). Just be aware, that you're not perfectly protected just because your using botex, but you're certainly better off than using base64. Now you might ask, how to put your email address on your webpage for everyone to see, without actually having it in your source code... For that I recommend creating an SVG image from your email address with a tool, such as Google Font to Svg Path. When that SVG is clicked you can open a mailto link, that you decrypt using botex. Some people encode email addresses as HTML entities or put them on the page in reverse character order and flip them again using CSS, but I suspect that bots have by now gotten the hang of that, too. One note on the opening of mailto links on click though... I don't know about you, but I hate when a page is doing that... I much prefer having two icons either next to the email, or appearing as a popup on hover or on click, that let you select to either open the mailto link or to copy the mail to the clipboard. Checkout this example for selectively copying the mail or opening it.