Email, Skype, Phone and Jabber/XMPP anti-spam obfuscation

Below you will see what appears to be an empty anchor tag to any agent, like a web crawler, who isn't using JavaScript - hardly anyone human these days. It uses the standard jQuery library, which you must download. That means that you see an ordinary mailto: link but the crawler doesn't:

If there are any dots in the username or the part of the domain name before the top-level suffix (e.g. com, net etc), replace it with # instead.

It now works with Skype too! If there is a dot in your Skype name, replace it with # instead.

or

It now works with phone numbers too! If there is a plus symbol in the country code, replace it with # instead. You can then split up the number arbitrarily into a prefix (e.g. the first four numbers, missing off the leading zero) and the rest of the number. This should be compatible with iPhones and Android.

It now works with Jabber/XMPP too! If there are any dots in the username or the part of the domain name before the top-level suffix (e.g. com, net etc), replace it with # instead.

How this works

• View HTML to see what the crawler sees, i.e. nothing in the HTML <a>...</a> anchor tags and no link.
• If you only want it to work, simply add the lines shown after the comments and adapt where appropriate.
• View the JavaScript email.js, skype.js and phone.js that does this, improved and adapted from the versions on this site.
• You will need to download these scripts and put them in the web root of your site.
• You will also need to download jQuery 1.20.2 (allowing <= IE8 2009) or jQuery 2.0.3 (>= IE9 2011 and other modern browsers) as described on the jQuery download site.
• You will need to rename jquery-1.10.2.min.js or jquery-2.0.3.min.js to jquery.js (either version works subject to the browser restriction above: I have tested both here).
• For more detail on how it works, see this blog post.