Shopsite changes my code!

[sentinel]

Hi,

I have been adding Shopsite to my website. One of the things I do in my existing website is to put all the e-mail addresses in character codes. So the word "info" would be spelled out in codes thus: &-#-1-0-5; &-#-1-1-0; &-#-1-0-2; &-#-1-1-1; (without the dashes... believe it or not, your forum does the same stupid thing and it converts the above codes to the word "info", so without the dashes, you'd be wondering what the heck I was talking about!)

I do this to avoid bots harvesting e-mail addresses from the html. Since I did this some years ago, spam has no longer been a problem (after having to change the e-mail address away from the heavily spammed one that is.) This does not affect the website user as it appears as a normal address when moused over or clicked on to reply to.

Well, imagine my horror when I look and find that Shopsite (I'm using v.9) changed all the codes in my html BACK to the characters they represent! At first I thought I'd forgotten to put them in as codes and put it down to senility setting in. But then, after a while, I realized what was happening:

Shopsite converts character codes in your html to the characters they represent on opening a page for editing. Unless you change them back while doing whatever else you're editing, you lose the codes and have raw e-mail addresses in your html, ripe for bot-harvesting.

All hand-written code should be treated as sacrosanct. Like it's sacred scripture. The cart software should do NOTHING to it. Why on earth would its designers think I would deliberately go to the trouble of figuring out the codes and spell things out that way if I really wanted to simply type the character itself?

Is there a way in v.9 to force Shopsite to leave all html as is and not make the incredibly stupid assumption that I want my codes converted back to the characters they represent?

Thanks for your time.

[rippyj]

How about trying email address munging

http://www.addressmunger.com/

[sentinel]

Hey, thanks. I appreciate you making me aware of this. It appears that my original problem is caused by my browser reading in a custom template and converting address codes to characters at the read-in stage. So the issue is due to Shopsite having a browser-based coding interface. If they could use the likes of Dreamweaver, this wouldn't happen.

Using address munging as you suggest should work as there's nothing for the browser to convert. (I don't think it can convert Javascript back to characters!) Other than this, the workaround is to create a special include file for each e-mail address used and only edit it once and include it in a custom template. But, any time you open that include file you'll still have to fix it again. Just not every time you open the custom template as I was having to do.

I like your fix better.

Cheers!

[rippyj]

No problem, let me know if it works out for you.

John