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phpBB has a CAPTCHA image verification system on its registration page for preventing spam to your board, which is nice. To accomodate the blind and disabled who can’t read the image though, it says, “If you are visually impaired or cannot otherwise read this code please contact the Administrator for help.” But the administrator link is a plaintext mailto link to your email! Boo.

You know that if you put your email in plaintext on a website, or put a mailto link to your email on a website (or both), that spam bots will pick up your email and never let go, forever spamming you for the rest of your life, right?

Tools such as this online email obfuscator or this email cloaker apple widget turn your email into a HEX code, ASCII code, or javascript code to prevent spammers from getting your email. I’ve been using them for years and they work great.

Anyway, so how do you do this in phpBB?

I did a grep in the phpBB directory for mailto links with the following command:

grep -R “mailto” *

The culprit is the file usercp_register.php. Open this up and find this line:

‘L_CONFIRM_CODE_IMPAIRED’ => sprintf($lang['Confirm_code_impaired'], ‘<a href=”mailto:’ .
$board_config['board_email'] . ‘”>’, ‘</a>’),
Copy the whole line and paste it onto a second line. Then comment out the first line (add // at the beginning) to deactivate it. Then change the second one: Change

‘$board_config['board_email']‘
to your obfuscated email, the hex/ascii code that the email obfuscator gave you.

So your code should look like this:

//’L_CONFIRM_CODE_IMPAIRED’ => sprintf($lang['Confirm_code_impaired'], ‘<a href=”mailto:’ .
$board_config['board_email'] . ‘”>’, ‘</a>’),
‘L_CONFIRM_CODE_IMPAIRED’ => sprintf($lang['Confirm_code_impaired'], ‘<a href=”mailto:’ .
‘[your obfuscated email address]‘ . ‘”>’, ‘</a>’),
(where [your obfuscated email address] is the code the email obfuscator gave you.) Save and quit and you’re done!

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