How to protect click to chat Whatsapp button from bot web scraping?-PHP Chinese Network Q&A

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How to protect click to chat Whatsapp button from bot web scraping?

P粉786800174 2023-09-03 12:52:21

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<p>I am running a classified website where people can post their items and others can contact them via Whatsapp for more details. My website was attacked today and I'm seeing a huge amount of link clicks on the Whatsapp button in Google Analytics, it can't be artificial. I think it's some bot grabbing the phone number from the button link. </p> <pre class="brush:php;toolbar:false;">$phone= $row_posts['phone']; // for example $phone=" 212612345678" <div class="contact"> <a class="btn btn-success" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://wa.me/212$phone?text=TextMessage"> More Details </a> </div></pre> <p>I use it for Whatsapp buttons. As you can see, the phone number is easily displayed in the link href. I saw some websites like "www.mubawab.ma" using Whatsapp button but you can't see that number first time in inspecting the code. I want to implement similar functionality so that I can protect my user phone numbers from bot web scraping. </p>

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P粉3318499872023-09-04 10:54:24 1 floor

There are many ways to do this. Using a reCaptcha style interceptor is probably the best option. However, here is a simple implementation that will stop most non-targeted bots.

In PHP I encoded the phone number via base64_encode and then decoded it in JavaScript using atob.




  " target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="#!">
More Details

The code generates this content in HTML:

const wa = document.querySelectorAll("[data-wakey]");
wa.forEach((e) => {
  const p = atob(e.dataset.wakey);
  e.href = "https://wa.me/212" + p + "?text=TextMessage";
});