forum.coppermine-gallery.net
No Support => General discussion (no support!) => Topic started by: real_kastor on August 05, 2005, 01:13:39 pm
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Hi,
I'm using coppermine now for nearly two years and I'm very happy with it. But since 2 weeks I have a problem. The university of Leipzig is developing a online thesaurus, and therefore the use a bot named "findlinks" (http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/findlinks/).
It seems that the new revision (Useragent: findlinks/0.945 (+http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/findlinks/)) of the bot can "vote" for pictures. I'm logging the IP's of the voters, and I get only votes from the adress range which belongs to the University of Leipzig, and my Webalizer statistic shows me that visits from findlinks happens quite often and to the times I get votes.
I've got a robots.txt which restricts access to the galery only to non robots, but this does not stop findlinks (by the way, goolgebot obeys the rules of the file). For now, I'm using a .htaccess which stops phantom-votes from findlinks, but in the near future I will move with the complete homepage to a free php/mysql hoster, but this one does not support .htaccess files for security reasons.
Is there a possibility to get a coppermine-wide useragent filter/blocker?
Greetings from Germany,
Kastor
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change the voting links from html links to javascript links or a form and some javascript. Bots usually don't execute forms. Afaik there's a mod posted somewhere.
However, you're requesting support, so you shouldn't have posted on the board named "General discussion (no support!)". Please post a link to your site - a moderator will move your posting accordingly.
I also suggest you complain at the findlinks page - tell them their bot should respect robots.txt!