Is a telephone number needed?

[Enigma121]

Why not do what we did, leave your phone number on the website, but place it on as an image file only. Don't have any text based equivalent and apologise in advance to users with non-visual browsers (blind and partially sighted web users), giving suitable alternative contact information.

No sales calls at all with this approach to date. It seems that these questionable marketing firms are using search engine bots / spiders to trawl sites looking for phone numbers / dial codes etc.

Note sooner or later you'll need to be listed in a phone directory or newspaper. This is more or less guaranteed to get calls coming in so go for TPS at this point.

[justsomeone]

Rather than going straight to an image, you could use javascript to build up your phone number. This will allow people to copy and paste your number into their address book etc...

While any browser will be able to run the javascript, a lot of web spiders don't really speak javascript - they're designed to plough through as many pagaes as possible as quickly as possible. Taking the time to interpret javascript is often seen as a waste.

There will still be some visitors who have javascript turned off, but for those folks you could use an image.

[Ian J]

There is a program for obfuscating email addresses that is quite useful and it works with telephone numbers too.

There is an online version here but I downloaded a stand alone program that does exactly the same thing from here

[Enigma121]

Humm, using javascript leaves the phone number as a text based entry. We can make assumptions about how spiders behave in general, but anyone writing a spider for the basis of spamming might well look through the entire response for numbers (I know I would).

Searching for text in images is an entirely different, processor intensive activity.

[Enigma121]

Again, looking at the obfuscator, this is converting characters within the e-mail / telephone number to unicode text. This isn't going to be a massive problem for a well written spambot, as chances are it will understand and correctly parse unicode without problems.

The alternative solution we have deployed is within our mailserver. Here we have added a filter which checks incoming mail against list(s) of known spammers, any matches are automatically rejected, but a record is kept within the mail log file. This is very effective at stopping e-mail spam, bouncing on average 4 messages per account per day.

We are able to offer this business focused spam filtered e-mail hosting to other customers, if anyone is interested contact us to discuss further, using the details on our site at [url]http://www.enigmaconnections.com[url]

[mindblend]

Originally Posted by justsomeone

Hang up on the sales reps, don't cut off your customers

Agreed. I used to cold call - the best way is to just hang up.

[justsomeone]

Originally Posted by Enigma121

We can make assumptions about how spiders behave in general, but anyone writing a spider for the basis of spamming might well look through the entire response for numbers (I know I would).

Agreed, if the phone number is still stored as "0800 1234567" in the javascript.

But if you represent your phone number as a mini-algorithm, something like, forgive me writing pseudocode here, haven't the time to code it and haven't written much javascript in a long number of years


$a = ((7*11)-1)*1000000000;
$b = 907*987897;
$c = ((5*11)-1)*10000000;
$d = ((3*10)+1)*(100*1000);
$e = ((3*19)+12)*(100*1000);
$f = 100 * 100;
$g = 4 * 20;
$x=$a + $c + $d +$f +$g;
$y=reverse($x);
$z=y.replace("800", "800 ");
print $z;

this sort of solution uses a series of simple maths and string functions to build up the number. The number can then be displayed by the javascript, and it's still text as far as the user is concerned, so (s)he can copy/paste it into any other application.

It's fairly unlikely that a spam spider would take on the overhead of churning through all javascript on a page on the off chance that there might be a phone number in there. It would be far happier going for the option of extracting easy numbers quickly fromm more pages, than doing a fraction of the pages more thoroughly.

[www.t6c.co.uk]

I have the perfect solution.

You get a premium rate phone number, and tell advertisers its the "purchasing line".

They can talk to me all day on it if they like.

[Teresa2084]

Hi

Sorry T6 but thats the worst solution and will not only put his customers off as the cost to make a simple call is too expensive and it will lose him business straight away just seeing the number and not one that should be used as a method to stop sales reps ringing at all.

To the gentleman in question here is the best solution and will not put your customers off nor will it cost you anything nor will you have to change or delete your number off your site. I assume your in the uk?

Underneath your number on your site in small letters put
(TPS registered, direct sales companies need not call)

Now TPS is the telephone preference service and that means that any sales company ringing you up will get in serious trouble and the fines are so large a company will not fancy coughing up if you report them to the TPS. When a sales rep rings you just say your TPS registered and that will be enough to make them put it on thier database that they mustn't contact you again. It will put the wind up any sales company in the UK ringing you for advertising or anything else they want to sell you

To be registered TPS it does cost money but theres no law to say you cant say your TPS registered nor to have it under your number on your site. And those sales reps dont know your not really TPS registered nor do they check and it does work in most cases.

Teresa

[mindblend]

[quote=Teresa2084]Hi

Sorry T6 but thats the worst solution and will not only put his customers off as the cost to make a simple call is too expensive and it will lose him business straight away just seeing the number and not one that should be used as a method to stop sales reps ringing at all.
/QUOTE]

Agreed. Get a nice 0800 number and just deal with the sales calls as they come. Just ask - Is this a sales call? If they say yes just hang up.
Easy.