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Telephone Links: Spam-Bots

This document discusses how to include clickable telephone numbers on websites that will allow mobile users to make phone calls directly from links on the page. It recommends including the full international dialing number for the "tel:" value and also displaying the number in the link text in case the link doesn't work. Best practices include using a country code, showing numbers elsewhere on the page, and disabling automatic phone number detection for strings that may be incorrectly identified.

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amogz
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77 views

Telephone Links: Spam-Bots

This document discusses how to include clickable telephone numbers on websites that will allow mobile users to make phone calls directly from links on the page. It recommends including the full international dialing number for the "tel:" value and also displaying the number in the link text in case the link doesn't work. Best practices include using a country code, showing numbers elsewhere on the page, and disabling automatic phone number detection for strings that may be incorrectly identified.

Uploaded by

amogz
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Telephone Links

Telephone Links
spam-Bots Keep in mind that the smartphones people are using to access your website
Be aware that by putting an email can also be used to make phone calls! Why not save your visitors a step by
address in your document source, letting them dial a phone number on your site simply by tapping on it on the
you will make it susceptible to
receiving unsolicited junk email
page? The syntax uses the tel: scheme and is very simple.
(known as spam). People who <a href="tel:+18005551212">Call us free at (800) 555-1212</a>
generate spam lists sometimes use
automated search programs (called When mobile users tap the link, they get an alert box asking them to confirm
bots) to scour the Web for email that they’d like to call the number. This feature is supported on most mobile
addresses. devices, including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Internet Explorer,
If you want your email to display on and Opera Mini. The iPad and iPod Touch can’t make a call, but they will
the page in a way that humans can
figure it out but robots can’t, you can
offer to create a new contact from the number. Nothing happens when
deconstruct the address in a way that desktop users click the link. If that bothers you, you could use a CSS rule
is still understandable to people, for that hides the link for non-mobile devices (unfortunately, that is beyond the
example, “jen [-at-] oreilly [dot] com.” scope of this discussion).
That trick won’t work in a mailto link,
because the accurate email address There are a few best practices for using telephone links:
must be provided as an attribute
value. One solution is to encrypt the • It is recommended that you include the full international dialing number,
email address using JavaScript. The including the country code, for the tel: value because there is no way of
Enkoder Form at Hivelogic (hivelogic. knowing where the user will be accessing your site.
com/enkoder/) does this for you.
Simply enter the link text and the • Also include the telephone number in the content of the link so that if the
email address, and Enkoder generates link doesn’t work, the telephone number is still available.
code that you can copy and paste
into your document. • Android and iPhone have a feature that detects phone numbers and
Otherwise, if you don’t want to risk automatically turns them into links. Unfortunately, some 10-digit num-
getting spammed, keep your email bers that are not telephone numbers might get turned into links, too. If
address out of your HTML document. your document has strings of numbers that might get confused as phone
numbers, you can turn auto-detection off by including the following meta
element in the head of your document.
<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

For Blackberry devices, use the following:


<meta http-equiv="x-rim-auto-match" content="none">

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