Website Company Information Legislation

Earlier today I read about a change to the Companies Act, which basically means that corporate websites need to display certain information, which they didn't necessarily have to before. If you manage corporate sites and haven't heard of this, you may like to read the article on OUT-LAW for more details.

That article links to a page on OUT-LAW, which has the details about the legislation. Most of it makes perfect sense, and a lot of it came in a while back, but the bit that gets me is this:

The email address of the service provider must be given. It is not sufficient to include a 'contact us' form without also providing an email address.

That seems a shame. There's no accessible way of putting an e-mail address on a website and keeping it safe from spammers, so I tend to just hide the address behind a contact form, and I know many others do the same.

Plain text is obviously not safe from harvesters, and I really can't see that bob AT example DOT com is either safe or usable, even though it is popular. With the botnets and cheap computing power at their disposal, harvesting scripts now execute JavaScript and perform OCR, so you can't use JS tricks or hide the address in an image.

That leaves you with time-sensitive addresses that you throw away after a week or a month, or hiding the address behind a CAPTCHA - but neither are perfect, and both seem like a fair bit of faff.

Whereas I could see the benefit to customers if it was a phone number that was required, I really can't see why displaying an e-mail address would benefit either customers or companies. All it means is that my clean hidden addresses are going to start getting spammed. What a pain.

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